BuckeyeBlog

As you’ve hopefully seen, The Buckeye Institute now has a database online of state employees’ salaries. This is a step forward on the private front but something like this really should have been compiled by Governor Strickland’s administration a while ago. Simply put, it’s not the job of outside organizations to make government more transparent. A post at the Sunshine Review Blog touts the database and a statement by Mike Maurer of the Institute which makes the same point I make above.

Don’t think this is simply a state-level problem. As a Canadian website which promotes “visible government” notes in a new article, the Obama administration has also promised a more transparent government, specifically on the technology front. During the campaign, Obama’s website promised the following:

Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities. Greater access to environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves.

While we all hope that President Obama takes the steps forward necessary to increase government transparency, you wouldn’t get a sense of progress by looking at the new White House website, which is actually less transparent than the website of his predecessor. Many of the media briefings we expected from day one are just now surfacing online. Transparency needs emphasized, on all levels of government.

According to the Washington Post:

Senate Democratic leaders conceded yesterday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written and said that to gain bipartisan support, they will seek to cut provisions that would not provide an immediate boost to the economy.

Since that’s the criteria, does that mean the whole thing will be stopped? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it means that the price tag may be dropped by $200 million or so. That’s good as far as it goes, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see the final version end up close to the current $900 billion price.

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Dick Armey hands out some economic knowledge that should be kept in mind during the stimulus debate:

The problem with government attempts to manipulate the economy through fiscal policy — spending that takes resources away from those who are productive and redistributes it to politically favored interests — is that it is audacious. It assumes that government knows better how to spend and invest than individuals acting in their families’ best interest.

“The real question,” according to [Friedrich] Hayek, “is not whether man is, or ought to be, guided by selfish motives but whether we can allow him to be guided in his actions by those immediate consequences which we can know and care for or whether he ought to be made to do what seems appropriate to somebody else who is supposed to possess a fuller comprehension of the significance of these actions to society as a whole.”

In reality, no one spends someone else’s money better than they spend their own. The charade of the current stimulus package, chockablock with earmarks to favored pet constituencies and virtually devoid of national policy considerations, is the logical consequence of Keynesianism in action. It is about politics and power, not sound economics, and I believe that the American people will reject it.

Over at Reason magazine, Steven Chapman has a good critique of the current “stimulus” mania:

We all know how we got into this economic mess. We spent too much, borrowed with abandon, and acted like the bills would never come due. So what’s the prescription for getting out? Spending more, borrowing more, and acting like the bills will never come due.

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. This alleged cure deserves special scrutiny because it invites our policymakers to redouble the very policies that caused the crisis. Congress and the new administration are all too eager to abandon restraint so that we can overcome the consequences of excess.

Read the whole thing here. Unfortunately, our federal policymakers are unlikely to pass up the opportunity to say they are stimulating the economy (I stress say, since it’s hard to believe their plans will accomplish anything). Why pass up the chance to put out press releases saying that you are working on a fix, even if that “fix” only makes the problem worse?