The Notional Defenseman

A Roundhouse Kick to the Face of Open Government, Courtesy of Congress

As a major proponent of open government initiatives, having heard Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra speak at a number of events across DC, and as someone that has seen public data accomplish incredible things, it saddens me a great deal to hear that Data.gov, Apps.gov, the IT Dashboard, and a number of other useful websites will be shut down due to budget cuts in the coming weeks. 

I have a ballpark idea of how much these things cost to run (even at their most inefficient) and it pales in comparison to a number of things that are much less useful to the public and could be easily trimmed.  (Let’s pass on lawn maintenance for all GSA buildings for two weeks a year, or, say make our NATO coalition partners pay a bit extra for gas above Libya…)

These open data initiatives and cloud web sites were born from a new generation of government civilians and contractors who had the vision to use IT efficiently and with true impact.  These kinds of opportunities do not come around very often - lining up the right talent with the right decision makers to do the right thing with the right tech happens about as often as a total lunar eclipse - and the results of the sites have been lauded across the globe.  Shutting them down will be a severe blow to this new generation.

As someone who had a lot of hope we were moving in the right direction and as someone who has worked hard to support these goals this decision comes as a shock.  I feel like I’ve been punched in the chest or betrayed.  The government I thought we were creating together is just the same old government after all.  Perhaps I should not be so surprised, or have hoped with such naiveté.  I hope it doesn’t happen and we end up saving the sites.  Call your senator.

That said, we have a budget deficit and things need to get cut.  We can’t go around every little thing because somebody thinks it’s a wonderful idea, so, Seph, why are you so angry about these stupid web sites?  I’m angry because this is a result of faulty logic that will neither fix the bugdet crisis nor get us better government.  I’m angry because this is the result of timid lawmakers who are too spineless to do the difficult thing for the good of the country.

The only way we are going to get our fiscal house in order and still get better government is to cut programs that are not working, reform and update programs that are dragging, and keep those programs that have already been a wild success - especially if they’re cheap!

Cuts for cuts sake are not good policy.  We need to cut smartly, and sack up and reform entitlements to resemble reality.  Raise your hand if you think you’re going to retire at 55…. Hey! Put your hand down union dude, seriously it’s not happening.

For lawmakers that need clarification, here’s an example list of how I might solve our issues in a responsible way:

Programs to cut (example): weapons programs that are not even desired by the Secretary of Defense, multi-billion dollar infrastructure programs that don’t move the country forward, alternative energy subsidies (tax gas instead and they will become profitable on their own)

Programs to Reform and Update (example): Social Security - raise the retirement age three to five years to and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Really have stones? Raise it to match life expectancy increases since the legislation was passed during the New Deal.  Do it, seriously, I don’t care what AARP says this is insane.  Medicare / Medicaid - I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff that can be shifted slightly to better represent reality here when it comes to patient care.  All we need to do is baseline these programs against common sense economic indicators like life expectancy and inflation so that they don’t get out of hand. (To help with billing on the Medicare side, fix tort reform with a hard cap on law suits.)

Programs to Keep (example): Programs with high ROI for the government and citizens, like Data.gov.  Programs that produce quality weapons systems with innovative development processes (like Drones), health insurance for little kids (SCHIP), innovation competitions like DARPA’s Grand Challenge and the X-Prize.

Tax Options to Raise Revenue: Raise the taxes on cigarettes by 5-10 dollars a package.  Raise the tax on gasoline by 50 cents per gallon. (or 25 cents, or a nickel if you don’t have stones it’s still more than what we’ve got!). Reduce payroll taxes.  Raise income taxes (very slightly, like 100-200 bucks a person per year).  Tax bank profits at a higher rate or begin charging them a market insurance premium.

All of these are relatively pragmatic options could (and in many cases do) have broad support across both parties.  Stop acting like this is all about the next election and you might be surprised to find that you get RE-ELECTED.

I stand behind lawmakers with spine to do what is right, who speak plainly about why they wanted to vote for a bill but why they did not.  For all of our sakes, I hope they do the right thing.  For more great articles on this see basically every issue of the Economist for the last year where they call this out, and there’s a good one this week too.

Initial News via ReadWriteWeb

Update:
A response from carpe brings up good points about where can gain more revenue and the fact that there are a lot of tax revenues out there. (I’m responding here because I can’t seem to comment on your blog).  She’s absolutely correct - we need to close tax loopholes but I’m not sure what they are to get it done right so I didn’ mention them.  You can increase capital gains taxes slightly and produce a significant chunk of revenue.  You can decrease payroll taxes but increase taxes on profits to encourage hiring but taking a hair more off the bottom line.  These are good options but I’m not sure what the legislature would make of it - that said I’m not sure what they would make out of a gas tax either right now given the state of the economy hehe.

My tax hikes, I must say, were a bit selfish and a bit of libertarian paternalism.  As an amateur economist, I like seeing incentives to encourage good behavior like raising gas prices to make electric cars more appealing.  I would rather see that than a 12 billion dollar subsidy to wind farms and electric car producers because it’s less efficient.  Cigarettes need to be taxed anyway since they cost a boatload of money to the public but the costs are not borne by the consumer directly.  If they went away I would not be upset, and taxing them is a much more effective means of decreasing consumption - bans are crazy because they create the black market you talk about.

Also, to respond to the 90% wealth thing - you need to keep the United States a good place to do business, and you can’t make predatory / targeted taxes to specific industries without going down a slippery slope. (Would you target people based on their occupation and raise their taxes because they work in IT but not the service industry?  It’s discriminatory.) 

You don’t want to raise taxes and hurt small business / startups / growth engines, so do you tax one sector heavily?  Energy? That cost will be passed to the consumer. Banking? Sure, you could try it but consumer costs there will go up as well.  Just need to think about what impacts all this stuff has and their second and third order effects.  I appreciate your feedback and the counter-rant as debate always gets my brain moving.

31 March 2011 ·

• Tags
• Budget
• Gov 2.0
• Open Government
• Policy
• Tech
• Long Read

Message Bus - E-mail with Metrics via API

Just signed up for the Message Bus beta.  Message Bus was founded by CTO Jeremy LaTrasse, former operations manager at Twitter and President Narendra Rocherolle and CEO Nick Wilder, both formerly of Webshots and 30Box. (more at this ReadWriteWeb article).

Seems like a great way to use e-mail with your digital applications instead of having to stand up your own mail server.  I’ll be interested to see how this goes.  Now I just need an idea that incorporates e-mail Message Bus and can also use Tropo (really dig their syntax!) or Twilio for voice / SMS.  Anybody know of a good video streaming / hosting API to go full on mobile sensor platform? I’d love to hear any ideas for a development use case. Simple can be fun since it will take me awhile to learn the APIs and use them correctly.

29 March 2011 ·

• Tags
• API
• E-mail
• Web Applications
• Web Service
• Tech

Firefox 4: First Impressions

Just installed FireFox 4 on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine and thought I’d provide some initial feedback about the browser and the install process.

First, if you’re running a Mac or PC this won’t be an issue but for Ubuntu / Linux you’ll need to make sure you’ve added the Mozilla PPA Repository for software updates - Firefox is not yet available as an upgrade in the software center.

Once you open the browser there’s a convenient tutorial on the new tools and look and feel.  For Chrome users the whole thing will look very familiar but for those coming from IE it might look different (unless you’re running IE9 already).  There are a couple of nifty extras I haven’t seen anywhere else though that should really help my browsing speeds and real-estate usage.

Coolest Features I’ve found so far:
1) App Tabs - these stay open with Favicons in the top-left corner and take up very little space but you can tab to them at any time and they keep you running.  Awesome.  My webmail is definitely going to stay pegged there as well as probably Facebook, Tumblr, Flow (new task tracking system from MetaLabs) and Google Reader.
2) Grouped Tabs - FireFox 4 allows you to group tabs much like having four desktops on ubuntu.  this allows you to maximize your top-shelf tab real estate while not running multiple instances of the browser.  Almost a new browser window managed within the browser which is useful.  The interface is a bit more confusing than I had hoped but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.

Otherwise, look and feel is matte black thus far which I like a lot, and the load speeds are quite good.  Haven’t tested it on super-high javascript intense pages, but YouTube, Google reader, and others load swimmingly.

This might just wean me off of Chrome because of the greater support across production sites (good deal of stuff still breaks in Chrome unfortunately).  I’ll let you know if I make the switch permanently, but the app tabs are definitely enough to tip the balance.  Easy to emulate but gives the boys at Mozilla the edge in my mind.

More info on how to download here.

23 March 2011 ·

• Tags
• Mozilla
• FireFox
• Tech
• Review