Summary of the Equity Bailout; Money Going to Bailouts?

Here is a nice summary of at least one of the bailout plans, the $250 billion preferred stock recapitalization plan, ie the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) Capital Purchase Program. In other news, someone says that a State Street (NYS:STT) banker is getting a nice bonus check this year, courtesy of the US taxpayers.

I'm still not sure how this program is structured exactly, but I hope that this $250 billion comes from the $700 billion. The Wall Street Journal seems to say that ("TARP will also be used by Treasury when it puts new equity into banks").

Some feedback for the FBI

Since the FBI's Contact Us page doesn't allow you to email them, here's what my feedback states. Not that they'll listen to it.

First off, you can stop using these terrible feedback forms. There should be hardly any boxes, and more textual input. There's basically two things that people need to refer to: content and design. That's it.

Your main page seems somewhat overloaded.

Your Most Wanted terrorists page goes to a stange place where I can't go back -- it should be incorporated into your other page.

You shouldn't use tables for design. Update to more CSS.

Your History page should include links to laws that have affected you.

It's shameful that you have no email address on your website. I wanted to send this to you personally.

Usually I'm more harsh in my criticism, but again, it's not gonna matter anyway. The feedback goes into the void.

National Databases to Increase Government Efficiency

1. The Consumer Product Safety Commission database of products. The Senate just passed a bill requiring this, but the House doesn't like the idea. Similarly, other relevant information on each product should be added to this database.
   
2. A database on corporations. Contractor Misconduct is sort of a good start to this, but not quite. These databases should have all relevant information on a corporation, and should, of course, be linked to the CPSC's database, along with the usaspending.gov contractor database. To reduce overhaul, companies should be required to input this information themselves, after registering on the website. If the corporation is lax on updating its page, it should be fined.
3. A national database of all local police stations, recording all complaints on officer behavior and their official resolution. If you read Reddit or Digg, you've likely heard about ratemycop.com. The trouble is that none of these comments are official; they have to be taken with a major grain of salt. And, if you browse through it, you'll find that there's a lot of stupid shit on there already.
   
4. All complaints to federal agencies, including complaints on the federal agency's effectiveness, should be made public. All complaints which an agency collects as part of its duty need to be made public along with their resolution. There needs to be an appeal process. Note this story on on a study the GAO on the FCC's handling of complaints on business practices.
5. Obama recently revealed his earmarks. All Congress members need a profile connected to a database, and all earmarks need to be made public. This shouldn't be a choice.
6. A federal database on hospitals: misconduct of doctors, any possible performance ratings, a place to register to complaints. All prices for all procedures should be made public. Again, these profiles would be updated by the individual hospital rather than government bureaucrats.
   
7. Every government website should make all the complaints regarding its website functionality public as well. Thus, problems on the website (which I frequently find, but are rarely addressed) will be resolved quickly and efficiently if the agency wants to retain face. Comments should be votable by registered users.
8. A government account for all US citizens, detailing all information the government has collected on you. Access to this data would require a search warrant, and if any agency requested your information, you should be immediately notified. Libertarians will hate me for this, but I believe that the government should allow citizens to verify their identities cleanly and easily. Ultimately this will allow people to surf their web with their identities, comments, and so on verified if they so chooose.
9. All complaints/comments on government policy should be "votable" by those with verified identities a la Reddit/Digg. Thus, the complaints which gather the most interest will go to the top. Of course, all these things could also be sorted differently (by date, by most votes, by most viewed, by resolved, ect.) Plus, all complaints could be also be rated 1-5 stars by any web surfer. You could see what people with verified identities thought was the most important vrs. your average web surfer.
   

In fact, there's many more databases that could and should be compiled and made public, esp. in reference to government projects and their costs. These could be linked to each other to expose fishy connections and trends. Citizens could then see for themselves what business and government is doing.

While things like Wikipedia have made a good stride in linking together relevant information and greatly decreasing information asymmetries, Wikipedia can't link to information which is not publicly available. Plenty of the most juicy, important information for citizens is still hidden by the government.

As I've said often before, the first and most important function of government is to act as a bridge for information.

Spending By Executive Office of President

This has to been seen to be believed. The budget for the office of the President rose by an astounding 768% in 2004, and then by another 100% in the next year. Discovered this via Digg here.

I'd seen the outlays by function before, but missed the outlays by agency (actually, it's still on my desktop in Excel format)... going to try to look up the primary source for this right now.

UPDATE: The US government has a shoddy website, but I found the budget without too much trouble. Here is the budget, but you won't find that table there. If you click on the Executive Office of the President you can see a (very limited) breakdown of where his money went for the year 2008, and it seems, surprise, that the Iraq war gobbled most of it.

Scroll to the bottom of that page. and you can list all spreadsheets, where, at Section 4, you'll find Outlays by Agency. I'm looking at it and that picture is correct. The budget for the Executive Office of the President went from far below .05% in 2003 to .1% in 2004, and then up to .3% in 2005.

It's hard to know for sure what's going on with these spreadsheets because there is no legend. In the President Office budget the total BA (Budget Allocated?) is only 341 million but the "outlays" (expenditures) are 5379. Ditto for the next two years. What's going on? How is the White House able to overspend by so much? It reminds me of the extension of some law (Parkinson's, maybe) which states that spending will always exceed income.

Need it be said that the Republicans' rhetoric has never matched their record? They are the War and Business Handout Party, not the Small Government Party -- in contrast, the Democrats are the Farm-Labor Handout Party (in the forms of tariffs, often).