Posted Social Security report alpha 6

I mentioned that I would be putting up a report. This is one of a long backlog of reports that have been waiting on me finding technical talent to program. I've decided to shift strategy and put up report alphas and just manually update. This usually has massive scaling problems as the number of pages goes up which is why I've been avoiding this approach.

In any case, here's the first Citizen Intelligence report.

Will you get all promised Social Security Benefits? Here's a hint, for most americans, the answer is no under current law. Males born in 1955 or later and females born in 1952 or later have a pretty hefty Social Security cut written into the present law.

This is a manual report at present. I need to work out a scalable way to take e-mails so that I can send out the yearly updates for this report when the new trustees report means updated data. Ultimately, this report will be a module to be plugged into the yet-to-be-created Citizen Intelligence oversight dashboard.

How not to improve government

"Proof The Feds Are Stalling On Oil And Gas" is a boring article that isn't going to change anything about how the US Federal government handles drilling permits on federal land. It won't change anything because the approach used skips right past the foundations and prerequisites and goes straight to the charges.

To have effective, durable change, we would need to map out the entire process for drilling on federal land as a part of a larger project identifying what government does from soup to nuts. We need to insist on commitments for performance for each of them and normalize an expectation that the least efficient and effective things that government does will be heavily scrutinized for alternate arrangements.

Slow rolling permits is not something the bureaucracy is going to be happy to do when they know that to delay legitimate requests puts them at risk for unemployment. But that's not the world we live in. The world we live in has articles decrying oil drilling delays in an oil drillers website while the public blissfully goes about its business, in general rationally ignorant of the whole issue.

There needs to be a better way.

Social Security bust

Is the US government going to keep its word to you, personally, regarding your old age pension and health care? Actuarial Study 120 plus the yearly Trustees Report from the Social Security/Medicare trustees are your keys to finding out.

Once you spend an hour or two figuring it out the first time, sorting out the yearly changes isn't too hard. But who spends those research hours? Virtually nobody, that's who. This is why I'm working on a report so you just sign up and every year get the answer based on the official numbers you've already paid to have compiled but aren't going to go out. If you'd like to sign up, say so in comments.

The basic information needed is pretty simple. What year were you born and what sex are you? Table 6 yields life expectancy figures based on sex and the summary in the Trustees Report for the latest year gives you the best guess on what year the funds run out of money and your payouts get reduced and by how much. Plug in your birth year and look it up in the right table and you're done.

According to the latest (2013) report Social Security goes belly up in 2033, 19 years from now. If you have a life expectancy of 19 or greater, you're going to have to save extra money to make up for the shortfall.

The government doesn't give up to date mortality tables for every year. They just give them for every 10 years and then projected mortality tables in the future. So you can look up the 2010 tables and the 2020 tables and blend them to get a slightly better figure. Excel is very good at this. It does occasionally make a difference.

Social Security Report

Social Security provides two different pensions, disability (DI) and old age and survivor (OAS). Both pensions under current law are scheduled for draconian cuts. The DI pension system is due to be cut 20% in two years, 2016. The OAS pension system is due to be cut by 25% in nineteen years, 2033. The numbers come from the yearly Social Security Trustees Report.

I'm interested if people would sign up for a once-a-year report on this from Citizen Intelligence. It would require your personal date of birth to run the calculations of how these benefit cuts would affect you personally.

89,000 governments: Rough Categories

The US operates under a dual sovereignty system. That means that there are potentially 51 definitions of what is a government, the Federal definition and each state's separate definition. That doesn't mean that there are actually 51 definitions but that there are as many as 51.

The federal government maintains a census of governments which purport to count all of the United States' local governments under a uniform definition. There are five basic types of local governments.

Three are general-purpose governments: Counties, Municipalities, and Townships. The other two types are special-purpose governments: Special districts School districts.

Special purpose governments are the most diverse in character and some that make the state lists do not pass the federal tests of "Existence as Organized Entity", "Governmental Character", and "Substantial Autonomy". In less formal terms, there have to be people running the thing, it has to do something, what it does needs to be the sort of thing that a government would do, and the organization needs to be able to chart its own course at least some of the time.

State definitions of what a government is vary widely. Nobody seems to have done a survey to publish them all. This is in my bucket list.

Back to the books

It's time to brush off my web writing skills as I'm likely to be setting up my own rough prototypes for some basic structures for Citizen Intelligence. I have a nutshell book in my bookcase kindle on the subject of Drupal and I've decided to promote it to the top of my reading pile. We're getting to the point where it's time to take a good long, hard look at my coding skills and see how much I can bang together before I hire the rest of it out. I simply don't have the cash for a conventional development push.

America's government system is generally unknown

Government in the US is not a hierarchical endeavor entirely. General purpose governments are closer to that but special purpose governments are not really hierarchical at all. And you can owe a fine or go to jail for violating a special purpose government rule just as easily as for a general purpose government.

The judge sitting on the case will piously intone "ignorance of the law is no excuse" when we're talking about a situation where virtually everybody is ignorant. It's a system that cannot survive forever as a rule of law republic and it's visibly breaking down without the tools necessary to take things back under control.

If you know all the governments, you can ask important followup questions like:
How do I get in touch with them?
What do these people do?
Are they doing it well?
Are they doing things that they shouldn't be doing at all?

My county actually runs an amusement park. I would be fairly surprised if a majority knew that or supported the idea. Government is filled with situations like that where they are doing things that simply don't come to the attention of the majority.

On a larger level, the US has a communist style production system with respect to class I pharmaceuticals. To produce them, you need to get a special license from the Attorney General of the US and production quotas are published yearly just like the Soviets did. I would be shocked if 10% of america knew it or understood it and most would not support it.

Given that we have tens of thousands of governments (at the very least) and for a wide majority of US citizens we generally do not even know the names of all of them that claim jurisdiction over where we live, work, and travel on a daily basis, it's inescapable. We don't understand our own governments and have no practical way to escape a rational ignorance of the law.

Voter fraud via Obamacare?

While the tone is a bit over the top, this PJMedia article on Motor Voter provisions in Obamacare raise some troubling questions. Under no circumstances should we ever bypass established fraud checks. It's especially troubling if the federal government instructs the state to bypass fraud checks.

If this is actually happening, this is a great big warning sign. Normally, you would just raise your eyebrow and move on, giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. President Obama already blew through that with his electoral campaign practice of bypassing donation fraud checks on foreign addresses. He already had his second chance and blew it. This is at least round three on the issue of election fraud.

So how do you address the issue and figure out if it is real? The web sites will eventually get fixed and create a flood of records. The clock is ticking. The first step is probably to call your state's Secretary of State office and sort out if the article has its facts straight.

89,000 governments: What is a government

In the United States, there is no one, universally accepted definition of what is a government. You would think that there would be. There isn't.

If a government is considered a sovereign or subsidiary agent of a sovereign state organized separately from other governments, the numbers of governments out there can get quite large and even include organizations that are sometimes private and sometimes, when they are acting for other governments, put on the mantle of a government temporarily. I first ran across this on a random google search where it was pointed out that in some jurisdictions humane societies sometimes receive sovereign immunity from prosecution for their acts. The law isn't entirely settled. So do humane societies get included in the citizen intelligence database? They will be. I'm less sure whether to include them in my government directory books. If they do go in, such organizations will go under their own heading.

In the state of Indiana, governments are prohibited by the state constitution from taking on an excessive amount of debt defined as 2% of the property value of the property within its jurisdiction. For library construction, this is a hard limit to live under. While ordinary operations allow library districts to stay well below this level of debt, it would take a great deal of time to accumulate the money necessary to build a modern library without running over the 2% debt limit.

To build out a proper toolkit to manage all of these organizations requires adopting the broadest, not the narrowest definitions of government that apply. Citizen Intelligence as a project will be researching and using the definition in each state and monitor governments that qualify either under a state definition or under the federal definition used by the Census Bureau or both.

State Definitions

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

One of the things wrong with Wikipedia

I've been editing Wikipedia for some time using the account TMLutas. I recently participated in an AfD (Article for Deletion) discussion about a particular California school district, Loma Prieta Joint Union Elementary School District. This time wasn't too bad, with everybody quickly noting that governments are notable and that for a variety of reasons even a fairly non-descript school district should have a page. It hasn't always been that way and the attempts to delete these pages keep coming.

As part of Citizen Intelligence, I'm looking to improve wikipedia by creating an automated export of the school government data I collect and including it in the encyclopedia. I'm holding off on actually doing it because, frankly the explosion of AfD debates would swamp me. I'm not that altruistic. I think I'm not the only one holding back a bit by low quality attempts to delete articles. Its a shame. Wikipedia is ripe for an upgrade but its officious user base is holding it back.

89k Governments Document project

Just put up the first draft of an index to a writing project that has been bouncing around in my head for some time, the 89k Governments page. The purpose of the project is to write and refine what it is I'm trying to get done with Citizen Intelligence. It's time to organize and structure these thoughts as I start to seek people to come on board and turn Citizen Intelligence from a one man effort to something that has enough manpower to have a real impact on US governance and the relationship between the people and their public servants.

Something admirable from the Obama Admin

As a very small government advocate, it's pretty predictable that I'm not going to be happy with the present administration most days. It's nice, however, when I can occasionally break trend.

Executive Order 13462, signed this spring, sets the standard for federal government data to default to public and machine readable. That's a pretty good step towards 21st century government.

Both liberals and conservatives believe that reality favors their ideology but up to now, nobody's let loose enough data to get unambiguous comparisons. That's only going to happen when you have enough experiments, enough trials to pick out a clear trend. Here's to figuring out what's really going on.

Obama's America: part timer nation

James Pethoukis puts his thumb on how lousy Obama has been on unemployment but doesn't explain sufficiently.

Right around Obama's election, the two lines diverge and stay that way. The extra distance equals all the people who used to be full time workers and are now part time workers. These are not unemployed. They are just american dream deferred.

They are reduced from a dignified life to scrambling on the economic edge of society. In a Republican administration it is the top line that would be trumpeted as the real rate of unemployment. In this administration it's the bottom line that's touted, when unemployment is mentioned at all.

Niven's law, as applied to government

Government is Magic says Sultan Knish. Wretchard chimes in that we are seeing the Return of the Sorceror. They are both right but neither goes far enough. The deeper problem is that Government has advanced so beyond our understanding that Clarke's Third Law applies, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". We do not seriously have a grasp of what it is, what it does, how it does it, and where money is being wasted in dead weight losses, fraud, and abuse. Government is a series of nested black boxes that we examine the inputs and the outputs of, sometimes unpacking the top layer or two, but never going down all the way to the last black box and across the entire enterprise. Unless you unpack it all, government is mysterious, unknown, and unexplainable in any rigorous fashion. It is effectively magic. But not only Clarke's law applies but a near converse does as well, "Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology." That's almost Niven's law. At present we occasionally manage to pull the curtain back to see the man behind it, demystifying the process. This should be the normal state of affairs. We should always know what the man behind the curtain is doing, if only in the form of inputs into our intelligent agents creating our business intelligence dashboards so we can keep an eye on things without devoting every waking hour to do so. Government is a technology for getting things done. Some things it does better than the free market. Other things it does worse. The libertarian's list of what it does better is very short, just like the socialist's list of what government does worse. Defining what government does, and how well it does it, is within our technical capability. It is not done because we do not demand that the government supply the information necessary for it to be done. We can and we should.