https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
> On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclusion. The way Social Security works is not sustainable. Period. Something has to give. A $405 B shortfall on SS in 2015. If that was at least half, we would actually not be running a deficit. We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept.
A quick third take away seems to be the unprecedented rise in non-cash government aid (food stamps) during the Obama administration. The data is there, needs more analyzing of course.
Lastly, it seems that Government revenue for Federal and State/Local has actually increased pretty linearly with the population. Despite all the different changes in the income tax rate/other progressive taxes. This supports an overhaul to the tax code to a more simple, flat tax system. From another data source outside this report, I'd have to find it, but historically, no matter the top bracket tax rate, the Federal government collects about 15-17 % income tax. Including when the top rate was 90%+.
As far as the presentation, my favorite part is each piece of government data is tied to 4 distinct duties of government outlined in the Constitution. That's pretty brilliant.
This seems like a pretty poor argument for a flat tax and in fact could be seen as an argument against it. If raising top end bracket taxes didn't increase overall income, then it must be the case that it reduced the tax burden on lower incomes -- which is the entire point of progressive taxes. So progressive taxes work, let's keep them!
I view this as mostly orthogonal to the issue of tax simplification, however, which I think is probably a good idea.
I don't believe the tax burden on the lower classes in the US has ever been lessened by increased rates at the top levels.
Would a flat-tax fix this? In theory: but if we set that "flat tax" to 15-17%; (and simply pocket the cost savings from simplification of tax code) - that seems like a win. But the very poorest quintile can't pay that. (and are equipped to dodge that, by simply not working and collecting aid or taking black-market work - cash-basis labor, or selling drugs, etc.) - the top quintile will also have the means to avoid paying their fair share. As always.
It's those in the middle, who have to work REAL jobs, and can't hide their income though either black-market means, or tax-shelters: which still work in a flat-tax system.
The government will need to raise overall rates to compensate for this, and the middle gets screwed even more.
That's an IDEAL system.
In the REAL world: the wealthy will still lobby for special deductions.
Personally, I'd like to see the mortgage deduction go away for non-primary residences.
Stuff like "dancing-horses" deductions and the absolute murder "small businesses" get away with, (like; taking their personal Truck as a deduction, by calling it a "work truck") - that can be horse-traded around. But I think there is the most to be gained from the mortgage deduction on non-primary residences. This is probably America's most sacred cow. And therefore, is most likely politically impossible. This is why we've been at a stalemate over tax-reform since 1980.
The primary reason to simplify the tax system is to remove as much influence special interest groups have in regards to carving out special exemptions. Making the system a simply sign and forget return type. A complex burdensome system only provides power to the political class.
The real reason to cap tax rates is because it has been proven time and time again, the more they have to spend they will and thereby pay a much higher over all tax rate.
Not necessarily. That would be true if the absolute $$$ collected were the same, but that's not what is asserted.
Consider the following: 10 people earn $10 and pay $1 in tax. 10 people earn $20 and pay $5 tax.
The total tax collected is 20% of all income.
Suppose the government raises tax rates such that the $20 earners will now pay $8 tax.
Say 4 of the high earners stop working as much (since their marginal rates are so high).
Now you've got: 14 people earn $10 and pay $1. 6 people earn $20 and pay $8 tax.
The government now collects 24% of all income. It also collects a higher proportion from the lower income people than it did before. It has lower revenues and people are, on average, poorer. In other words, everyone loses.
So you can't just look at effective tax rates to determine whether raising top end tax brackets was good or not.
This logic is not sound. Another option is that the wealthy hire accountants in order to avoid paying 90%+ tax on anything. Paying an accountant $1000/hr is almost nothing if it can save you millions of dollars in taxes.
So rather than reduce the tax burden on lower-income families, it's possible it just increased the income of accountants.
The flat tax is regressive. Regressive is bad because the value of money is roughly logarithmic as it increases. Any plans to make the flat tax "less regressive" is an argument against a flat tax. A simplified tax code is a good idea. It is quite possible to have a simpler tax code that is more progressive. Yet I find that flat tax proponents tend not to be in favor of that.
Strictly speaking, a flat tax is the border between progressive and regressive taxation and is neither progressive nor regressive.
Except it doesn't. The only way to for SS to collect from the trust fund is from the general fund. That means that in order for SS to get $1 from the general fund:
A) Raise non-SS taxes $1 to go into the general fund.
B) Cut $1 of other spending from the general fund.
C) Increase the deficit by $1
>Social Security's total income is projected to exceed its total cost through 2019, as it has since 1982. The 2015 surplus of total income relative to cost was $23 billion. However, when interest income is excluded, Social Security's cost is projected to exceed its non-interest income throughout the projection period, as it has since 2010. The Trustees project that this annual non-interest deficit will average about $69 billion between 2016 and 2019. It will then rise steeply as income growth slows to its sustainable trend rate as the economic recovery is complete while the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.
I'm not sure you can say it like that. It went up 2.13x from 1980 to 1990, 1.43x from 1990 to 2000, 1.93x from 2000 to 2010, and 1.07x from 2010 to 2015.
There was a big jump of 1.93x from 2000 to 2010, but that is only 2 years of Obama's first term. What really happened there is likely the housing crisis/market crash in 2008. I don't see how that's related to Obama. It only went up 1.07x (the lowest amount for each of the 10-year segments) for the remainder of his term, and it made a higher jump from 1980 to 1990.
Although it seems that state and local governments increased their non-cash gov aid spending a lot too during that time. I'm not sure what the breakdown on that is. Is it money given to the states by the Federal government?
The word "hubris" comes to mind.
A.) I spent more than five minutes. Regardless, I stated at "at a glance".
B.) I did not say the media has it all wrong. I said many things, NOT ALL, perpetuated by both sides in the media are different than the data from government sources. I don't think anybody would argue that both sides, especially recently, have had media reports that sketch and bend the truth. And both sides just claim the other is "fake news".
C.) I never said I figured out how to avoid deficits. I stated a problem, which is running a deficit perpetually is not sustainable. I'd love to hear a solution if you have one.
D.) For taxes, I once again stated an observation from the report, which supports the idea of a simplified tax system. No, I didn't lay out my full economic tax plan suggesting what to do. If you read one of the other comments, their is a link about historical effective tax rates, go check that out. That, along with the tax revenue by the federal government, is why I made my statement.
And finally yeah, the problem with social security is many faceted. But from a selfish, personal reason... highly unlikely any of the money I'm paying in right now will EVER come back to me. So yeah, I believe it's a problem.
Even assuming that is true, it wouldn't change the regressive nature of a flat tax.
The proportion of tax paid is the same at any income level. Anything that would counteract any "regressive" tax system would have to happen on the personal income side. Which means better education, opportunities, etc., to increase income levels.
I'd support a rule though that said if you make less than the poverty line (around 32k I believe?), you pay no income tax at the federal level.
Those surpluses that you're looking for were essentially just dumped on the federal balance sheet as non-marketable debt and spent on stuff like building aircraft carriers.
The "deficit" means that it's time to pay back those IOUs. It's pretty easily balance that -- you raise the threshold for payroll taxes and index it to inflation.
Flat tax is an awful, terrible idea. The reason that the 90% tax rates resulted in similar collection rates is that lots of things were deductible. All leases, most interest expenses. More people were essentially exempt from paying as well.
It's already indexed to wage growth rates, and there's nothing "easy" (or at least, shouldn't be) about a 12.4% marginal tax rate hike.
We've literally spent the last 30 years building up the Social Security Trust Fund.
We have just under $3 TRILLION saved up for the expected social security shortfall. People are living a bit longer than expected, so we're a bit short on money.
But the USA has run a social security SURPLUS from between 1980 through 2014. Believe it or not, the US Government is actually very long-term thinking and we are somewhat prepared for the future.
------------
Yes, so thank Jimmy Carter in 1977 for coming up with the idea to save money for 2010+. The "Baby Boomers" are now retiring, so its natural for us to lose money until the Baby Boomers die out. The question is if the Trust Fund can last long enough (ie: until enough Boomers die)
The problem is that there are a lot of people who believe that SS isn't broken because you can simply increase retirement age, make people pay in more, and other assorted band-aids. SS will be "solvent" until it suddenly isn't, and people need to realize that.
And with a stroke of the pen, they'll make adjustments. SS isn't a real debt obligation; it's merely a "promise".
Why is running a budget surplus necessarily a "good thing"?
Seems like if people are willing to trade real assets for paper, we should do that as long as there are willing counterparties.
That's why it's a good thing. Because we don't want to run out of "as long as."
Examples?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
yes, the first step is to remove the cap on social security withholding, which would affect the top ~6%. that would take care of over $100B of that yearly deficit.
Or not. Current projection by the Social Security Trustees are that the OASI trust fund will be exhausted between, IIRC, 2030 and never; the DI fund between 2020 and never (there's two separate trust funds involved.)
Search UI needs work, I guess
Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions.
The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn!
From the NYT [1]:
Want to know how many police officers are employed in various
parts of the country and compare that against crime rates?
Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets
and the cost to collect?
Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed
depression and how much the government spends on it?
That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
Use some examples from the above for the class presentations, then homework is to replicate with US data.
PS: if you decide to publish your presentations/course materials freely, do post the location to HN
I would not be so sure. There's no such thing as a point of view from nowhere.
Bias can influence the collection and computation of data just as easily as it can influence its presentation and framing. The old saying is "never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself."
In some ways, presenting as neutral means that neither group is going to trust you. I'm not sure if it actually accomplishes anything.
I know a lot of people would argue (reasonably) that all government spending should be clearly categorizable under such things, but not that they are.
It reminds me of the "ends policy monitoring" used by a non-profit I'm involved in. The staff pulls out each clause in our end goal ("Ends") policy and breaks down our activities based on those categories.
I'm wondering if this is something Ballmer got from corporate governance. It was new to me when we first started doing it. At any rate, I like it.
Compare the following: http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 vs http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966
In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year?
( imgur link to screenshots in case the links don't work: http://imgur.com/a/tY02j )
Or it's from another source that gives different metrics obtained every 10 years (e.g. from census) with some extrapolation?
In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run, it's the lack of source and other metadata that its more troubling.
In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run
The differences in those years are _huge_.
The big jumps on census years indicate that the census department does not estimate accurately when working with 9-year-old data.
[edit] So I went and put "why is death rate higher in census years?" into the google search bar, and the first result is "Causes of Death - Census". I didn't actually click on the link to find out, but that title certainly sounds like the census kills people. So maybe you're right. :)
What you just said doesn't make any sense and is a post-hoc rationalization besides.
The start and end points are the same between the two graphs.
Actually they are not. The starting numbers (1980) differ between the two charts by ~500,000 deaths.
To say that this nitpick throws shade on the entire project is a bit overstated.
My very first search on the data came up with this. I suppose I could have kept searching but that puts me personally at a 100% error rate. Maybe I'm just really really unlucky, though.
[1] http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?compariso... under "Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity". The combined count is "n/a" - maybe that's because the State & Local count has some overlap with the Federal count? So I took the maximum of the two.
Roughly half of Social Security's workforce consists of insurance administrators, who respond to and adjudicate claims and set individual citizens up with their benefits. Unlike State Farm, basically every American interfaces in some way with Social Security.
Again, an example of how a site full of numbers and line graphs can mislead by failing to provide context, while pretending to present a complete picture.
Same reason why we still have post offices in tiny towns.
I wonder how many of those think the government should get our of their lives?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...
People working in the perimeter of "social work" for the state generally do a lot to help people, who, for whatever reason, are often sabotaging themselves.
For comparison, there are 665k certified practicing accountants in the US.
Had anyone made the comic strip version?
Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans?
Steve: that's what the government is for.
Wife: I thought you might say that so I ran the numbers.
Steve: hmm, I'm not agreeing with your interpretation. I think we're going to have to do additional modeling.
USAfacts was born.
Months later...
Wife: are we ready to really help the poor?
Steve: this data is fascinating!
Yes. We do need both types of people in the world.
The humor for me hinges on "[Mr Ballmer] thought it made sense to first ... government" implying he sees it as a necessary sequence for him to dig into the data and he wasn't satisfied with the data he had access to. It also humors me that it reads like he doesn't consider the initiative itself being philanthropic. Yes, I do enjoy that it also allows for words to be put in Mr Ballmer's mouth for some darker humor: Mr Ballmer believes it's the role of the government. And Mr Ballmer couldn't find any of the numerous paths paved with objective analysis that he could use to get more involved in philanthropic work.
Of course, none of these interpretations match reality. I do like the intro coming across, at least partially, as normal geek thinking. I like that the About hasn't yet been PR distilled.
Frame it as "data-driven decision making" and we'll get 100s of think pieces from various tech luminaries and wannabe luminaries.
Steve: Did you know school teachers are one of the largest groups of federal employees?
Yes, its that Perot: Ross Perot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
edit: Exhibit A: Firearms licenses
Where did this data come from? What kind of firearms? What kind of licenses? This data is absolutely useless without context.
I didn't care much for how Ballmer ran Microsoft (except for his developer conference chants), but I'm really warming to the post-Microsoft Steve Ballmer.
- Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all public benefit corporations. If they spend our money we have the right to see their budgets.
- Governmental organisations borrow money outside of the government budget(!). This increases the government debt but does not show in the deficit. Just because the deficit is smaller than last year does not mean the debt is not growing faster.
- There is a world outside the US. The internet needs a one time stop for all public spending of the world, not just the US. Also you may want to connect the government receipts and expenditures from/to the international organisations, OSN, World Bank, the foreign aid etc.
- Public spending and receipts do not follow a tree hierarchy, it is a pseudograph. You will have to deal with so called offsetting receipts, extra budgetary fees, negative expenditures, positive taxes, transfers between organisations etc. We believe the only suitable visualisation style is a sankey diagram.
- There are huge size differences between individual budget items. Inside the executive branch you do not want to hide the $3 million sent to Marine Mammal Commission (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f22...) but you can not realistically show it next to the $7.52 billion sent to the Railroad Retirement Board (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3ca...). We solved this by a zoomable interface. (They call it the universe of public spending so let's give them a map!)
- The federal government does not even have a definite list of all governmental agencies. I am not kidding.
- You will never get all the data but you could build a wiki platform where city officials, school principals, government employees etc contribute with their bits and pieces. They can connect their receipts to the spendings of the superior organisations. If it does not match, citizens can investigate why. (If you want ordinary people to contribute with data you may need a human friendly editor too.)
- Different data dimensions will be useful to different people. Show the spending by agency, by programme, by function, by geography, by source etc. Let people combine the dimensions and create custom aggregates.
- Let people seamlessly share custom views and comparisons to social media (with relevant OG tags). We have a fake news industry to fight.
We wish you best luck.
When else have HN users adopted that approach?: 'Let's just be happy with what we have, and not criticize.'
These are constructive, very informative points; in fact, they may be the most informative in this discussion.
I believe this addresses (at least) your first two points. And moreover, it is a remarkable document because it reads something like an anatomical description of the organism.
Your point about world finance is strange: That is not what this thing is. The same for your wiki idea. Both good ideas, but why would this be a point of criticism?
BTW I don't even know what an OG tag is, so I'm not sure what you mean there.
The other things are not meant to be a criticism, just suggestions for what the ideal solution could look like.
OG tags define what image and description Facebook shows when you share a link. If you are in a middle of an FB argument you want to reply with a specific fact, ideally with a picture and description, not a link to a perplexing PDF.
This kind of presentation of critical data is just awesome. Thanks so much for putting this together.
* USAFactsSummary2017.pdf (7.1Mb) https://mega.nz/#!U7ZDHDhb!YXaC9K5U9DG9xjQXdhGGA6PuHE6fT9szh...
* USAFactsReport2017.pdf (48.7Mb) https://mega.nz/#!cupD1DRK!xFIfFl7fbx4XTpifCDhCM-wh7BQps11NO...
* USAFacts_10-K_2017.pdf (0.8Mb) https://mega.nz/#!MyBDXKwJ!mYxTgNJG33Yy0u9m2X4RyfADcKNczRKS_...
A use case I'm thinking of as an example is on the data source web site I construct a data feed that is represented by a URI to a data feed, consisting of say headers, columns and rows in a table data structure. I paste the URI into R, which pulls it over the wire and then analyzes the data, instead of me downloading the feed and massaging the data into a format ingestible by R. Ideally the format comes out of the box supporting some common data structures like tables and directed graphs, and lets users/developers create their own data structures.
Bonus points for the format supporting differential, incremental updates of previously-downloaded cached feeds.
http://usafacts.org/metrics/34352
--I do not think this is accurate.--
Edit: this is the college graduation rate. I assumed it was high school. Page needs more info!
that exists under the metric "naturalizations", which describes the process of acquiring citizenship.
Even if one gets beyond that and down to actual public records of facts, what is and isn't available to the public in the US is itself political. The public is denied so much information that in other nations they would expected. Want to see a candidates tax return? You have to ask. Want to know how many firearms are sold or how many people were shot by police last week? There are no electronic databases, even the government doesn't know. Want to see how much your neighbour pays in property taxes on his new house? Canadians can look that up on a website. Americans cannot as "privacy" too often trumps information. When access to facts is itself politicized anyone trying to neutrally report on those facts can only amplify divides.
I sometimes think that half the reason political polarization has gotten so bad is that politicians aren’t citing the same data. One lobbying group can provide one dataset, and that’ll get picked up by Democrats to support their idea. Another lobbying group will provide another dataset, and that’ll get used by Republicans for their counterarguments.
If this site could become the definitive source of data—the one that both sides of the aisle trust—there’d be a common data source in policy talks. That could lead to consensus much quicker.
I imagine Steve Balmer opens more doors and gets more cooperation than any of us here would get in accessing the same data.
Edit: It seems they're in the process of documenting the processes and methods they used to obtain their datasets. When this is released it could be a very useful tool.
It looks like they missed San Francisco's Payroll Expense tax http://sftreasurer.org/2016-gross-receipts-tax-payroll-expen...
Maybe I am misunderstanding how this tax works though.
I think all recipients of public funds should be required to account for all spending per hour, project and employee, and should also publish highly granular KPI and transactional data.
I don't necessarily want to see a 10-K, I want access to google analytics, the ERP system, and the financial ledger.
It should be possible for anyone with a copy of OpenOffice to determine the cost of the top 10% of patients at any public hospital, the cost of all high level "missions" the US Military is involved in, and the Federal employees who have received the most disciplinary action (or the most complaints).
As scraped from this web site ...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_104.30.a...
Edit: tbh it's a shame they chose to do it all in react/js. I think this sort of data would be better served to the world as good old html for the most part - the build tool generated source for some of the pages on usafacts is horrendous.
For one, the division into the constitutional categories is kind of awkward; most people would just like to see by function or department. When the drafters of the constitution wrote these clauses into the constitution, they had no sense that one day the government would be so large or do so many things. It is anachronistic to impose these clauses on a modern state. If everything the government does is somehow serving some role in the US constitution, isn't it kind of funny that virtually all democratic countries provide more or less the same services? The only major difference between the US, with its special constitution, and other democracies' spending is that the US government only directly provides health insurance to about half the population, and the US government spends more on defense and security. I don't think that difference is because of the constitution, but rather historical/cultural factors and randomness. So the application of the constitution simply reflects some kind of delusion on Ballmer's part.
Second, the data is sloppily put together. There is a line for "Social insurance administration" which includes federal and local employees but has no combined federal and local total. Then there is another line for "Social Insurance Administration (federal)" which has no federal/local breakdown but has a total. So are there no local social insurance workers? Why not just put everything in one line?
Third, this is almost entirely data you could get from the federal reserve's FRED system. In some cases you might need to go to the OECD site or the BLS site. But I'm left wondering: how did they spend years on this? This is more like an extended hackathon project. The data vis really sucks, too.
The site has probably configured themselves as "I'm under attack" as that will challenge almost everyone and ease load from their servers of bots (and those hitting F5 from the outset).
They're clearly on fire whilst they scale up, and I would expect that once they've got past the first week they'll ease up on the Cloudflare security level and challenges.
Noticed that on the front page. That's about as silly as referencing the average household net worth in the US, or the average income - both of which are astronomical due to how well off the top 1/3 are. Show me the median taxes paid.
Anything that claims to be non-profit is merely hiding the slant that its people have put on the data it is providing. The idea that anything can be presented free of the biases introduced by the people presenting it is a silly myth. Which is not to say people shouldn't make an effort to be fair and unbiased when trying to present facts, but we all have inherent biases that are basically impossible for us to remove ourselves.
Note that i've not yet seen the site, even with http it's under a nearly dead load haha.
The Tenth Amendment is pretty clear: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Now, I know, the Supreme Court has effectively gutted the Tenth Amendment, but the intent was that the Federal government was restricted to a specific set of activities, rather than allowed to do everything everyone thought was a good idea.
So if you think that the intent matters, then you see much of what the Federal government does as being a power grab of things that it never should have had the power to do - and which it still does not have the legitimate authority to do.
It's the foundational document of the most powerful, prosperous nation in the history of the species. Things like that attract allegiance. It would be strange if it didn't.
"It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution."
Your "some people" straw man is likely fictional, or at least very rare. Laws that conflict with the constitution can be struct down via Judicial Review. Otherwise new laws are entirely compatible with the constitution. The US and its various states have no difficulty producing reams of new laws that survive the constitution just fine.