BuckeyeBlog

Hamilton County Commissioner Pat DeWine hopes to establish his county as the first in the United States to put all government expenditures online for public review - including everything from electronic funds transfers to purchase orders to ordinary checks.

Also included would be grants, leaseholds, contracts and subcontracts and vouchers.

“Every item of government spending is available to citizens on the Web in a way that they can easily search how the government is spending their money and who is getting their money,” DeWine said Thursday.

Named the Government Accountability in Spending Program, GASP, the project would require that each disbursement be identified by amount, the spending agency, the budget fund source, the payee name and location, the type of transaction, and the purpose of the expenditure.

DeWine said he hopes to introduce his resolution establishing GASP Wednesday, May 21.

Sandra Fabry, government liaison for Americans for Tax Reform, said GASP was one of the first efforts to apply substantial transparency standards to local government, following significant state and federal transparency initiatives in the last few years.

“It’s not a right-left issue, it’s a right-wrong issue,” Fabry said. “Government spending should not happen in the dark.”

Among models for the effort, DeWine cited the state of Alaska’s online checkbook, hosted by the state division of finance, available at http://fin.admin.state.ak.us/dof/checkbook_online/index.jsp

As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, "Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight ."

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors - all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

After the army, the courthouse is the third line of defense for civil society. If the bailiff in this story had been a public school student, would he have suffered only a two-week suspension? “Zero tolerance” seems too often to lead to zero common sense.

Here’s supporting the judge in his right to carry. Let’s just hope he’s not a hothead himself.

If you watch any of the cable news shows you may have seen Naomi Klein on them recently, discussing her book The Shock Doctrine. In it she makes the claim that Milton Friedman was essentially an enabler of dictators around the world and that he and his followers fomented crises in order to deregulate markets and thereby plunder the wealth of these nations. Anyone who has read Friedman knows this is ridiculous, but Klein has become a celebrity on the statist circuit for telling those audiences what they want to hear.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Coalition on Housing and Homelessness in Ohio (COHHIO) has been a big supporter of the push to ban short-term loans, aka payday lending. There’s nothing wrong with individuals banding together as an organization to lobby government. That’s the essence of the First Amendment. But is it proper for taxpayer-supported organizations to do so? Or, to put it another way, should organizations to which you, as a taxpayer, are forced to hand over your money be pursuing a political agenda?

COHHIO receives a significant portion of its funding from government grants. Now, according to its tax forms (available if you are a member of Guidestar), it spent almost $500,000 in 2006 on lobbying. That’s more than it spent on “training and technical assistance” to help the homeless. Now, I’m sure there are requirements that the money it gets from the government is kept separate from its lobbying money and that COHHIO has the proper firewalls between funding sources. I’m not accusing them of breaking any laws. I’m concerned about the wider issues here. The government funds, at the very minimum, support the overhead and salary of COHHIO officials. Without these funds, COHHIO would have a difficult time doing its work, whether that is lobbying or providing “training and technical assistance” on homelessness issues.

You have no choice but to support COHHIO’s work. Even if you disagree with them, they get your money. Is that right? Is it right that a group gets taxpayer dollars and that this group may be working against your interests before the General Assembly?