Action Alert: Freedom Should Have No Cost!
Budget Transparency Now!
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One of our highest priorities this General Assembly is budget transparency – putting the state budget online in an easy to search, Google-like format. This should be a non-controversial issue. However, just as with eminent domain reform two years ago, there are signs of a struggle early on.
Last year, when several states established easily-searchable online budgets in the aftermath of the Coburn-Obama bill which put the federal budget online, our General Assembly ran out the clock and let die the idea that the people should be able to track where the politicians “invest” (i.e., spend) their money.
But they are not beyond other devious tactics. Just today, the Department of Planning and Budget attached an incredibly ridiculous fiscal impact statement to SB 936, patroned by Senator Ken Cuccinelli (R-37, Fairfax) and co-patroned by Senator Chap Peterson (D-34, Fairfax), to make it appear that it is not financially feasible to see your own money. The cost according to DPB? $1.5 million! Last year, it said it would cost $1 million! All this while the federal government’s $2 trillion annual budget was put online for only $1 million. As the Virginia budget is “only” $39 billion per year, there is no way it will cost anywhere near the amount it cost the federal government to put its budget online.
Furthermore, several states put their budgets online, in a Google-like format, for free! The organization that sold the federal government the software to put its budget online, has made much of it free to state and local governments. The states that have incurred costs recouped them more than exponentially in the form of discovered savings – for example, Texas found budgetary savings of nearly $5 million immediately through the discovery of duplications and expects to save tens of millions of dollars more in the near future.
Budget transparency and the people’s right to know should have no cost – even if the costs were real. It is the people’s money and we have every right to know where it is spent. When we invest our own money, financial institutions, under state and federal regulations, must make available to us the ability to track our money. Politicians love to say how they are “investing” our money in education, transportation, healthcare and the like. If they are such great “investments” let us see where the money is getting spent!
ACTION: SB 936 and HB 2285 are in the Senate General Laws and House Science and Technology Committees, respectively, and could be debated as early as next week. Contact these committees and tell them we deserve to know where our “investments” are going with an easy-to-use, Google-like format!
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