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Make Government Information More Transparent

Technology, Social Justice, and Making Things Better

UPDATE: CROP Walk web donations are closed but you can designate gifts (or make general donations) via the DonateNow or JustGive buttons on the RUMC home page.

First, go to the Ramona United Methodist Church CROP Hunger Walk page. Donate a few dollars. A half dozen of the folks with whom I go to church and I are participating in this event; with a few mouse clicks so can you. You’ll get more satisfaction than from anything else you could do on the Internet right now.

Second, if you’re interested in how technology like that page might help make things better for more people, go to the Texas Review of Law and Politics (TROLP) table of contents for the most recent issue and read the third article, Continue reading ‘Technology, Social Justice, and Making Things Better’

Local Investing Can Build Global Markets

I’ve been the strongest possible advocate for global free trade ever since my Soviet Economic Institutions professor diverged from the syllabus to draw Ricardo’s theory on the board and prove unequivocally and concisely that it makes everyone better off. I still am. Dennis Santiago, however, makes strong arguments for local investing for California and Los Angeles — and good news: they don’t contradict the case for global free trade. Continue reading ‘Local Investing Can Build Global Markets’

Economic Choice vs. Political Choice

Some choices are better made economically, with individuals able to decide for themselves how to maximize their own utility by allocating their own resources as they see fit. Other choices are better made politically, with groups deciding how to allocate their collective resources to maximize their collective utility. Continue reading ‘Economic Choice vs. Political Choice’

What if Some of this Waste Had Instead Gone to Passenger Intelligence IT?

We taped this story at the intelligence facility responsible for passenger manifest information. Given the focus of attention on the use of intelligence about passengers in recent days, the choice of location seems all too prescient. The reason we chose the location was to illustrate the point of the story: the homeland security budget process was broken and needed to be fixed. Continue reading ‘What if Some of this Waste Had Instead Gone to Passenger Intelligence IT?’

XBRL Data Tagging Standards Advance on Two Fronts

Government Transparency

Updates:

The House approved S. 303 by voice vote on Monday, Dec. 14. The bill text and debate are immediately below; the debate starts on page H14837. An easier-to-read version of S. 303 is also below. The most important part of the bill, about data standard requirements, is in xml format here.

House Debate on S. 303 (Cong. Record pp. H14835-39
S. 303 – See pp. 14-19 re common data standard

Official statement and edited video.

Original post:

Back on June 17, I blogged about the Government Information Transparency Act. The goal of government information transparency took a step closer to reality today when the co-sponsors of the bill, Reps. Edolphus Towns and Darrell Issa, added their bill’s provisions to a Senate bill to improve the federal grant system. The gist of the legislation is that when it is implemented, taxpayers will get protection via transparency and rules-based reporting in a way that’s similar to how investors now get better information from public companies via a combination of U.S. GAAP and XBRL. The good news is that government grant accounting is a heck of a lot less complicated than U.S. GAAP, so that protection should be faster to arrive, much less expensive to implement, and even more reliable.

Here’s video of this landmark meeting to advance government transparency:

Economic Transparency

Also today, the SEC posted a new more detailed comment on a pending rulemaking about how asset-backed securities are disclosed. It’s 13 pages of plain English. (See background, including excerpt from a speech by SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro.) Of the millions of words written about the financial crisis, these pages include just about every word you need to know:

Edgar Online re ABS: Modernize Disclosure, Cut Costs, Achieve Transparency, Restart Securitization
Even better, unlike most of those other millions of words, these words include an explanation of how to reconcile the interests of Wall Street in profits with the interests of all Americans in healthy, working, fair, transparent capital markets. Let’s hope the words spoken on Capitol Hill today and the words posted by the SEC today all matter — soon.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thurion/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

‘People Have More to Fear from Governmental Responses to Economic Crisis than from Crisis Itself’

Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government