I know what you mean. I find it incredibly frustrating that we HAPPILY go after minuscule savings on things like data.gov and NPR, meanwhile it is 100% taboo to talk about cutting big budget areas like the military. In my opinion we need to be looking at the big 3 because that is where we have the best opportunity to make significant improvements.
Yeah but you've got to remember that every program has a constituency.
The fact that we're the constituency, does mean that we have to temper our vociferousness with solid arguments and evidence. This stuff is important, but remember, there are programs out there to feed impoverished children. Is data.gov more important than that? Maybe not.
The point is though, that data.gov and open government data is, given our governing system should be more efficient, and provide better results than alternatives, such as making everyone go through FOIA or scraping individual agency sites, and relying on a patchwork quilt of agency disclosure.
Why should we be reasonably? The other people who goes to Washington aren't, so if we are it will put us at a disadvantage.
As for those who can't feed their children without federal help should have learned to keep their legs closed or at least used a condom. I feel sorry for the kids, but there are soup kitchens or private charity.
You always have to be reasonable, everybody has to be. 'oh but they're not either!' is not a reasonable argument (yes I see the circular reasoning in that).
As for the second one, I oppose heavy state interference in private affairs and social security too, but if you're suggesting that feeding poor children is less important than maintaining a website, quite frankly you're insane.
It sucks, but the truth of the matter is that cutting back Defense, Social Security, and Medicare are touchy issues that can't be done easily. Far easier to cut back things like data.gov, which will only upset a few Silicon Valley techies.
It seems to me that at this point, they're looking for politically low-hanging fruit rather than fiscally low-hanging fruit.
Exactly. Many techies avoid politics and activism or fail to learn the skills to do it well. The learned helplessness leads to becoming the low-hanging fruit.
The solution isn't to get involved in politics, it's to put an end to this "if you haven't died by the age of 18, you get to cast a vote". At least a four year requirement of a four year STEM degree at an accredited university should prevent people who aren't used to dealing with facts from getting us all killed.
Democracy is a great idea so long as you limit whom you consider "the people".
Given the number of people employed in our industry without a university degree — many of whom are leaders in their subject matter area — i think your proposal is not just obviously discriminatory, but spitting into the wind of a gale of contrary evidence.
Get out, see the world, go talk to people in places and industries where a university education isn't paramount, and then tell me again that they should be denied a right to vote.
Technically, SS/Medicare/Medicaid are raised and funded on their own taxes, separate from the discretionary budget. (You can see "income tax", "FICA" and "medicare/medicaid" on your tax bill).
When people talk about the deficit, they're typically talking about the operating budget deficit, which is only funded from income tax and runs on a separate budget from the SS and medicare/medicaid administrations. So it doesn't really make sense to advocate cutting entitlements to address the deficit, they have problems too but they're separate problems.
Think about what those things actually are. We're a post-industrial economy, since we don't make anything anymore, your "big 3" are the American equivalent of Bread & Circuses in Rome.
Defense. Job program for millions of workers.
Social Security. Welfare 2.0 -- after the Clinton welfare reform, you get bumped out of welfare after a few years. So people get declared "disabled" instead. Also, checks for grandma and checks for people with chronic disabilities.
Medicare. Healthcare for grandma. Welfare for big hospitals and doctors. Ever notice hospitals are always under construction? Medicare is what pays for it.
Medicaid. Healthcare for the indigent, and tool to make red state more appealing to business. (Protip: Compare Medicaid benefits in South Carolina to New York or Michigan.)
What's a post-industrial economy? Is it like an industrial economy that got tired, and needed a little sit-down while it's credit rating was still good?
Pretty much. The US once created lots of stuff, now 31% of corporate profits are earned by the financial sector. (ie. passing our money back and forth)
We still have a substantial manufacturing base, it's just that we've squeezed the jobs out of it by emphasizing high productivity and automation, while outsourcing the dirtiest work. The developing countries can enjoy more industrial jobs because their wages are lower, but the U.S. is already facing a "robot economy." We just haven't raised the question politically yet.
I wonder what the Roman equivalent to the financial industry is. I'm talking about the speculators who deal with CDOs and the other frighteningly complex finance products that led to the economic crisis. Soothsaying?
You don't need dollars to buy oil. Oil is currently sold in other currencies as well. In fact, it doesn't matter what currency it's sold in, as you can easily exchange currencies in the market.
"More than a third of our petroleum, about 37% of our total usage, is produced domestically by our own oil companies. I'm not sure why people seem to forget about those guys, ExxonMobil and Chevron and all of them; you may resent them but they are the principal source of our non-foreign-dependent energy. So this means that only a bit less than two thirds of our petroleum is imported. That still means most of our petroleum comes from OPEC, right? Wrong. Most of our petroleum imports come from non-OPEC countries; 56% of it, in fact. Of that 56%, the majority is from Canada and Mexico, who are about as far removed from the Middle East as can be. The rest of it is from other random places like Angola, Russia, the Virgin Islands, and Brazil [...]"
The interesting thing is that transparent data would allow for a more efficient and transparent government, as everyone could look for inefficiencies.
A web site is also the 21th century way of providing this data, who goes to request data from an archive as a stack of papers these days?
It's pretty ironic indeed that this gets shut down. Obama started all kinds of sensible things at the beginning of his term, and now pulls them back one by one.
Defense
Social Security
Medicare/Medicaid