Transparently Faster

by Paul Jacob

If a promise is important, clear, specific — and keeping it would be honorable — well then, it's bad to break it.

Alas, political candidates make and break such promises all the time. They make the promises to get votes, then break them from political expediency.

Usually, politicians don't admit this. Usually, if they note the lapse at all, they plead some fictitious but awesome and unexpected impediment.

So, for example, candidate Obama's promise that final legislation going to the president's desk would be accessible online in every detail for a full five days before he signed it — well, that quickly went by the wayside. So has the idea of tracking every particular of so-called “stimulus” spending. Technical difficulties, they say.

Who knew the web-savvy Obama campaign would have so much trouble with “the Internets thing” once they got into power?

For some reason, however, a private company — unburdened by the rush to sign us all into permanent debt bondage — is doing much better when it comes to reporting the runaway spending. The Washington Times tells us that a firm called Onvia is tracking federal expenditures “down to the local level . . . in real-time speed.” Onvia has free software that people can use to follow the dollars.

Sounds like time for a little outsourcing.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The Obama administration is opposed to outsourcing.

Paul Jacob's "Common Sense" is published by the Citizens in Charge Foundation. Their website can be visited at www.citizensincharge.org.