IDEA: Government Efficiency Standards Modeled on Fuel Standards

"... what [is] good for the country [is] good for General Motors, and vice versa." -- Charles E. Wilson, former President of General Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower Administration.

The White House recently mandated new fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks sold in the United States. Presently, the U.S. fuel standard is 28.3 miles per gallon. The new standard mandates 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, just fifteen short years from now.

This new government standard mandates a 93% improvement, saving money and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Cars and trucks sold in 2025 must be nearly TWICE as efficient as they are now. New cars could travel the same distance burning only half as much fuel. Imagine the power of the government's mandate!

Okay, now imagine if U.S. citizens placed similar mandates on the federal government. By 2025, we could have a similar-sized federal government that burns only half as much money.

Currently, the U.S. federal government borrows about $0.42 of ever $1.00 that it spends. If we could improve government efficiency at delivering necessary services, we could reduce our enormous budget deficits and reduce the national debt.

Resources for Tracking Campaign Spending

A variety of people have requested information on how to track campaign spending. Here are a few of my personal favorites. I would love to hear if you have others to suggest.

Center for Responsive Politics

My all-time favorite tracking tool for campaign spending is OpenSecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Their search engine could use some work, but the information is generally there for those willing to dig a little deeper.

Here are some of the things that you can find.

• Which groups are the biggest political spenders in U.S. federal politics?
• Who are the biggest contributors to my Congressman, Sam Farr over his career?
• Who are the top-spending Political Action Committees (PACs) in the 2010 election and how are they spending their money?
• Who are the top-spending 527 committees in the 2010 election and where do they get their money?
• Who were the top individual donors during the 2008 election and where did they spend their money?
• Who or what organizations are funding a specific 527 committee?

Also read their free online guidebook, "Follow The Money: A Handbook for Do-It-Yourself Data-Digging".

Influence Explorer

Influence Explorer is a great tool courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation. It doesn't provide as much detail as OpenSecrets.org, but it's a great starting point to see overall spending and relationships.

MAPLight.org

The MAPLight.org web site is another great resource. I find it particularly useful for tracking Californian politicians, my home state. Here are some of the things that I can find using MAPLight.

• What are the top political interests contributing to my California Assemblyman, Bill Monning?
• Who are the top donors to Bill Monning?
• By default, MAPlight only shows current year donations. However, with the search engine, you can dig deeper and into prior years.

Influence Tracker

Influence Tracker is a fun tool courtesy of Wired Magazine, MAPLight, and OpenSecrets.org. Enter the name of a federal-level politician, last name first. It then creates a web page showing the contributions to the politician and (my personal favorite), a NASCAR-like shirt with the logos of the largest contributors.

The text box in the lower left corner includes code so that you can embed the result in your own website. Here's an example screen capture for Harry Reid, who is running for U.S. Senate in Nevada.

Don't confuse Influence Tracker with Influence Explorer listed above.

National Institute on Money in State Politics

FollowTheMoney.org is another good site that is very complementary to OpenSecrets.org, which focuses primarily on national races.

CampaignMoney.com

I find the CampaignMoney.com site itself difficult, but it often comes up during Google searches. It only shows contributions to a campaign, and not spending with a PAC or a 527 committee.

I find it easiest to enter a search string directly in the browser address field. For example, here is a search for George Soros spending during the current election cycle. This gives you the general pattern.

http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/george-soros.asp?cycle=10

ElectionTrack.com

ElectionTrack.com is a great resource for tracking campaign spending in California. It's fairly simplistic, but timely and easy.

For example, I used the specific page on those funding Yes on Proposition 27 to write a recent article revealing how the donors supporting Proposition 27 are well-connected to a single political party. It's easy to search for a specific donor or amount.

Federal Election Commission (FEC)

The Federal Election Commission web site is the ultimate resource for tracking federal elections spending, including PACs and 572s.

• Click the Campaign Finance and Data link.
• Then, click Search the Disclosure Database link.
• You can search for donations from a specific individual.
• You can search for a Political Action Committee (PAC). For example, here is the search result for "Patriotic Majority PAC" for a recent article about this fake Tea Party group.

Internal Revenue Service

• Search for Political Organization Disclosures
• Tips for Successful Searching of Political Organization Disclosures

California Secretary of State

The ultimate resource for tracking campaign spending in California is the Secretary of State's office. Likely, there are similar sites for other states.

For example, I needed historical data on those funding opposition to 2005's Proposition 77, a previous attempt at redistricting reform.

FundRace

The Huffington Post FundRace tool is another tracking tool for campaign donations. It has some relatively good top-level tracking tools on where money is going by occupation and city.

NPR

Here's an oldie but goodie from NPR dated from 2008. NPR has had some good journalism about "shadow money" (examples here and here), but I do have some concerns about possible corrupting influence going forward due to the Soros/Open Society Foundation investment.

"Who's Who: Key Leaders Of Independent Groups", September 2008.

A Hidden Gem: Even Authors Get It!

With Tax Day rapidly approaching, I thought I would share a little gem discovered while reading Steve Martini's political thriller, Shadow of Power, embedded on pages 126 and 127.

As dreaded April 15th engulfs me, I have just finished another frustratingly-confusing 80-plus-page love letter to my favorite uncle, Uncle Sam, who seems in constant need of ever more money. My accountant assures me that all is correct, but how am I to know for sure?

I thought about highlighting the particularly good or entertaining sections of this gem but then realized that I would end up highlighting most of it anyway.

"Only the insane of the eighteenth century could foresee that a bleak two lines added to the Constitution a century after its creation, authorizing the collection of a federal income tax, could result in a seventy-year rampage by government to mentally rape its own citizens with millions of pages of totally unintelligible tax laws, rules, regulations, and forms.

"Today we have special federal tax courts because the law is so convoluted that ordinary federal judges are presumed too ignorant and unschooled to understand the complexi­ties of laws and forms that every citizen down to the village janitor is required to understand, to obey, and to sign under penalty of perjury and threat of imprisonment.

"Nor could it be possible in the Age of Reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they're smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil.

"With all of this, the people in what is touted as the great­est democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn't trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved the power to a serpent its creators never saw. 

"Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.

"Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all plod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff."