With all that time on his hands after he retired as Microsoft CEO [not to mention all that money], Steve Ballmer began casting about for something new to do. He bought the L.A. Clippers a few years back, but hes a numbers guy, a tech guy and a business guy. What to do with those three interests? He created USAFacts.org, which put economists, data experts and designers to work assembling all the numbers they can find about government getting and spending.
There are trillions of dollars out there, most of them already published somewhere. But USAFacts is working to put them all together on an easy-to-use website and to organize them so they make sense a veritable Wikipedia of government money, useful, in time, for classroom curricula and for civic enlightenment. Because government isnt a business, profits arent a yardstick of effectiveness, but outcomes could be, and thats one thing Ballmer hopes USAFacts can offer. Whether theyre good or bad outcomes, he says thats up to citizens.
In short, its about values, not judgments.
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What was the genesis of this, apart from the 800 on your math SATs?
I only had 790; just the facts!
I was talking to my wife about three years ago, when I first retired from Microsoft, about our nonprofit work, and she focused in on issues of child welfare and the like. She was saying, OK, you spent enough time doing this other job now its time to help me in our philanthropic stuff.
I dont know if it was some combination of being tired, or wanting time off, but, come on when it comes to taking care of the less fortunate, particularly kids in need, the government does that. It helps the poor, the sick, the disabled, and all we should do is pay our taxes and support the government.
And her response was, Not good enough. And of course she was right. On the other hand, it made me want to say, Hmm, I wonder if the government does do a good job of this? And I went searching for information. I had a hard time finding what I was looking for. I thought it would be nice to find something like you can about a public company. Couldnt find one.
I said, How do we get that amount of data about how government takes in its money, where it spends it, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of outcome? Because theres no profit outcome the government is maximizing against; certainly theres no way for any of us to say something has absolutely succeeded or absolutely failed because it depends upon your value set and the way you make trade-offs.
Even something like crime there are aspects of crime where reasonable people can disagree over whether a drop in incarceration statistics is a good thing or a bad thing, if its related to certain offenses that people see in different lights. So what we chose to do wasnt to say whats right or wrong, but rather show the measures on which government reports, and then let people come to their own points of view about good and bad.
Take, for example, are Social Security and Medicare working? Well, you would evaluate that presumably on what the quality of life looks like for seniors over 65. And you have to put together a bunch of government data to be able to paint that picture because without that picture, Im not sure how anyone would assess the efficacy of Social Security and Medicare.
Theres of course a whole other thing we havent even touched, which is, with whom specifically does government spend its money? Not what does it spend it on, but who are the contractors and the like? A number of websites have tried to do a good job on [this], and some seem to have made some progress.
If you go to USAFacts, what can you find? And what do you want it to look like in a year, two years, five years time?
What you can find today is a longitudinal view of how much the government raises in taxes and from whom, by family type and by income quintile, what the government spends its money on, again longitudinally. You go back, in most of these areas, as far as 1980. In some areas, the data is less available.
What does government spend its money on, by what Ill call constitutional charter? The preamble of the Constitution lays out some distinct missions for government, and we just took those to be the definition: establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, etc.
If you make them confront [their differences] in numbers as opposed to adjectives, people sometimes find theyre closer together than they thought.
Steve Ballmer
Well show you where the money got spent and then, where possible, well show you follow-on data on specifics of how the moneys being used, or outcomes.
What is happening to CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions? Whats happening in terms of the number of crimes that people report, the number of arrests, the number of people who wind up in prison, how long they stay there?
What really is the quality of life for people pre- and post-income transfers coming from the government, like Medicaid or food stamps or some of the other social programs?
In most cases, we will show you things pre- and post-inflation adjustment, as a percentage of all spending. Thats the kind of thing you can find in USAFacts. Youll find that written up in a linear narrative in something we call the annual report, a document thats like a corporate 10-K.
Will this become a kind of Wikipedia of government figures?
Thats a reasonable way to think about it, as a Wikipedia of government figures. Theres a lot more information that wed like to get in here. Wed like to show outcome data, down to the state, maybe even the county, city, maybe even school district level.
We hope to package the information so that as things become topical in the news, you can see an amalgamated set of relevant data on important topics of the day. And we can tweet that out and otherwise make that available through social means.
Were there any pieces of data that you thought were important that you wanted to include, but couldnt find?
There were in a number of areas. Take the supplemental poverty measure I think that one only goes back about 12 years.
If you really want to measure the outcome of the healthcare industry, to understand how many procedures of what form happen every year and then be able to detail the cost for each procedure or each disease type, we have to look harder. Or maybe that doesnt exist.
Healthcare has emerged as the single largest spend-point in the U.S. economy, and the government heavily regulates healthcare. It pays for healthcare, and sometimes the whole structure of the industry is dependent on what government does. Having a complete understanding of the industry is important to understanding governments role.
The number of guns in the United States thats not a statistic thats captured, and yet we think it would be of interest. Whatever side of the gun issue you are on, its an interesting issue for people to understand how many people own guns, how many total guns are there out there, how many guns get sold every year. Some of that data is available. Some of it is not.
Is there a difference between how government keeps its books and how business does, given that each of them has a different goal?
Businesses use something called generally accepted accounting principles; government does not. Actually, thats not true some parts of government do and other parts do not, in some very important ways. When you build a new bridge, do you show all of the costs in one year? Or do you show all of the cash going out in one year, but then the cost is borne as the bridge gets used? This is a way it would be done in the private sector.
So there are ways in which I think it would be useful, if nothing else for comprehension, because more people understand business accounting than government accounting. On the other hand, most of the outcome measures of government theres just no equivalent properly represented in the business world. Something like an arrest rate or the number of people in jail should you show the number of people in jail? Should you show the number of people in jail on one day? Should you show the total number of people who go through the system? Because youre not measuring profit on these outcome measures. You have to decide whats really important.
This is a nonpartisan site thats all about information. But putting that out there supposes that what underlies some of the national rancor is a lack of information. Do you think thats right?
Well, I might not say it exactly that way. My experience has been that people can get themselves very worked up about their differences, and yet if you make them confront [their differences] in numbers as opposed to adjectives, people sometimes find theyre closer together than they thought. Whether that will solve the differences or not, I dont know, but it really cant hurt to have both sides work with the same data set.
Youre a mathematician, youre an economist , youre a business guy, so you know the Disraeli line about lies, damned lies and statistics.
We really worked hard to provide context, historical context, context of other numbers the government is also doing. If you spend $10 billion on something, is that large or small? It depends on your perspective. So we will show you what thats like as a percentage of government spend. People know what $10 billion means to them.
Now, can the numbers support differing points of view? Absolutely, they can. Ill give you one example:
The number of household fires and the damage done is down quite dramatically over the last 37 years. Most people might say oh, thats great, nobody can disagree with that. Ill bet you can find people who will say, Hey, look: Its because weve put such onerous restrictions on people in terms of product safety, the price of these products has gone crazy and the value in terms of reduced fires is not justified relative to the increased cost of products. Its not an argument I would make or not make Im silent as to the point but even on something that seems so genuinely good, and everybody can agree on it, Im sure you see differences just because people make different trade-offs.
As youve been looking at the data your team has been collecting, what findings surprised you?
Im not saying any one of them is good or bad. Im just going to say they surprised me:
Im thinking of a day when you have a candidates debate or something on the floor of Congress, and someone a candidate, a member will say, well according to USAFacts
Id love it. But you know what theyre really saying: according to the numbers published by the government of the United States. Theres not a number in there that wasnt published by government, or a mathematical computation from numbers published by government. Id be pleased for them to quote USAFacts. Id be even more pleased if they used USAFacts to find the numbers and then they quoted the official government source that provides the information.
The reason why numbers are so good is that theyre not liberal and theyre not conservative, theyre not Democrat and theyre not Republican.
If you were grading how government keeps track of its numbers, how efficient it is insofar as you can tell about using its money? Is there a grade you would assign it?
In terms of how good it is about its numbers, Id give it a B-plus or A-minus, for the amount of data that it collects. Id give it a C-minus or less for its ability to put the numbers in a digestible and usable form that gives it real perspective and context.
The second question you ask is a little different: Does government use its money efficiently? I cant tell you whether the screwdriver that gets used to build the warship is too expensive or not too expensive.
I will say, though, that when you look to the bulk of spending, I dont sit there and say, Wow, most of this money is probably wasted. If you look at the people who work for government, most of the jobs are teachers, policemen, people who work in government hospitals its hard to think of those as, quote, bureaucrats.
Thats a big part of the cost base. The second big part of the cost base comes from transfer payment. Theres one thing thats true about Social Security and Medicare: Theyre very efficient. If youre trying to transfer money to a human being, they do it very, very effectively, very efficiently.
Some people will say, you shouldnt be transferring the money, but thats not an efficiency question. Thats an effectiveness and value judgment.
As far as the Clippers go, this one question: Youve heard that people sit down at a slot machine, they play, they play, they play, they win nothing. They walk away. The next person comes along, sits down, one spin wins the jackpot.
So here are Clippers fans in Los Angeles whove heard a question about whether the Clippers are going to move, and they feel like that: Theyve invested and invested and invested, and just when things are looking good are the Clippers leaving?
Oh, no. Thats I wont say its a silly question, but its a silly question. I did notice it was a little bit out in the Tweetosphere recently, and I dont really understand where it comes from.
Ive been black and white, crystal clear: The Clips arent leaving L.A. If I wanted to take a team that I paid $2 billion for, cut the value by maybe as much as 50%, Id move it out of L.A. because teams in L.A. are valued more. Theres just no chance well leave Los Angeles.
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How Clippers' owner Steve Ballmer is trying to create the Wikipedia of government figures - Los Angeles Times