Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Simple questions on government oversight

The US government sector runs through approximately $6T or 40% of our $15T economy.
You would think that with that much money flowing and with us decades into an information age, all the easy questions would have already been answered. Here are a few that haven't been.

Who holds elective office?
What are the names of all governments in the US and what are their jurisdictions?
What do governments do?
What does each government do?

Four, arguably five questions that should be at the baseline of any citizen effort to control this huge economic sector. There is no unified list of all officeholders at all levels. There isn't even universal agreement as to what is a government and nobody keeps a list of all their jurisdictions. The data is out there, but fragmented. There is no one unified chart of accounts that could be used to identify all the things that government spends its money on, much less unified regulatory code description tags to easily tease out which jurisdictions ban certain activities like taxicab street pickup.

How can any reasonable person imagine that we have the control mechanisms in place to actually oversee government and stop it from getting out of control. The foundations simply do not exist.

No comments:

Post a Comment