Washblog

I'm not an expert in this process.  The number of people who ARE experts in this process probably number in the hundreds.  I've spent some time this morning jumping through publications and "presentations" about the budget process, and I'm getting really frustrated with the lack of useful information.  Words and Numbers are great, when it's your job to deal with this at the state level.  In the residential areas, we need something big picture.  How about a set of pie charts that show where the money comes from, and where the money goes.  How about putting that online so we can click around and expand a section to see what the details are, then zoom back out to the big picture to look at something else.  The 2007-2009 budget highlights has something like this on page 2, but only for expenditures.  Revenue is in some black box somewhere.

How about tracking each and every transaction, each and every check that comes from taxes, and making that information public like it should be?  That way we can stop thinking of this as a process that "those people in Olympia" have to deal with, and our ideas might have some clout because they're based on the same information that the "experts" use, from the same source.  How about a Buxfer for state government?

Here's sort of what I'm looking for, from the Department of Revenue.  This is from 2007.  In a flat PDF format.  Give this to us in a dynamic system where we can log in, change things around how we like it, and submit it as a completed budget.  If someone wants to add in the potential revenue from an income tax, give them the ability to do that.  If someone wants to dig in and actually see the dollar amounts on what is spent on non-citizens (something my mom is freaked out about thanks to right wing crank radio idiots), show it to us so we can cut it out of our budget proposal and see just how minor an expense like that would be and what it would cost us over the next few years.

We need a Sim-City for the state budget.  For county budgets, city budgets, even the Federal Budget.  That's the kind of transparency I'm talking about.

Any other ideas?