Average Annual Change in Mean Family Income, 1950-2010, by Quintile and for the Top 5 Percent.
Source: Pew Research report “Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier: The Lost Decade of the Middle Class” p. 9.
The State Budget Crisis Task Force was convened in June 2011 and issued its report in July 2012.
The top line quote from the main site states:
State finances are not transparent and often include hidden liabilities as well as rapidly growing responsibilities which are difficult to control. While state revenues are gradually recovering from the drastic decline of the Great Recession, they are not growing sufficiently to keep pace with the spending required by Medicaid costs, pensions, and other responsibilities and obligations. This has resulted in persistent and growing structural deficits in many states which threaten their fiscal sustainability. [emphasis added]
Striking quote on inability to understand that debt != revenue:
California is also confused about the meaning of the term “revenues”. Asked at a 2008 budget conference whether Schwarzenegger would consider raising revenues to balance the budget, Thomas Sheehy, deputy director of the Department of Finance, replied that the governor’s budget, in fact, already included new revenues: $3.3 billion from the sale of deficit bonds! A corporate executive who reports borrowed dollars as sales is angling for for a bunk in federal prison. It doesn’t take much financial sophistication to understand that a cash advance on your credit card isn’t revenue. It is debt.
The authors follow this with this comment which I think is of striking relevance to Open Spending:
The first, crucial step towards responsible and democratic budgeting is to present the state’s fiscal information to Californians honestly and clearly.
It also reminds me of Niall Ferguson’s statement quoted in a previous post:
The present system is, to put it bluntly, fraudulent. There are no regularly published and accurate official balance sheets. Huge liabilities are simply hidden from view.
Not even the current income and expenditure statements can be relied upon in some countries. No legitimate business could possible carry on in this fashion.
I have been trying to create screencasts using RecordMyDesktop on Ubuntu. While the app itself functioned well I had a serious problem with the image quality: switching windows seemed to lead to massive diagonal pixelation of the captured images rendering the screencast useless.
I played around for a while with various RecordMyDesktop settings (frame rate, full capture etc) but to no avail. Some searching on the web brought me to this forum post which appeared to describe an exactly similar problem — the screenshot in the original question was almost identical in pixellation effect to what I was seeing. (Aside: interestingly the user says there problem arose after they installed compiz so that may be part of the cause …)
While the forum did not have a resolution for RecordMyDesktop it did provide a working ffmpeg command line command that worked perfectly:
ffmpeg -f alsa -itsoffset 00:00:02.000 -ac 2 -i hw:0,0 -f x11grab -s $(xwininfo -root | grep 'geometry' | awk '{print $2;}') -r 15 -i :0.0 -sameq -f avi -s wvga -y screencast.avi
Excerpts and commentary on Niall Ferguson’s first Reith Lecture. All emphasis added.
In reading this piece I thought constantly of the Open Spending project where we are endeavouring to collect together government (and other public) financial information from around the world and present it in an understandable way. In particular, it made me wonder whether we should try to do more beyond collection and presentation of the data to provide additional (necessarily somewhat speculative computations) such as proper financial balance sheets.
The present system is, to put it bluntly, fraudulent. There are no regularly published and accurate official balance sheets. Huge liabilities are simply hidden from view.
Not even the current income and expenditure statements can be relied upon in some countries. No legitimate business could possible carry on in this fashion.
The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron.
There is, in fact, a better way. Public sector balance sheets can – and should be – drawn up so that the liabilities of governments can be compared with their assets.
That would help clarify the difference between deficits to finance investment and deficits to finance current consumption. Governments should also follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
And, above all, generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the inter-generational implications of current policy.
The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly thirteen times the debt as stated by the U.S. Treasury.
Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.
These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure.
As our economic difficulties have worsened, we voters have struggled to find the appropriate scapegoat.
We blame the politicians whose hard lot it is to bring public finances under control, but we also like to blame bankers and financial markets, as if their reckless lending was to blame for our reckless borrowing. [ed: but bankers often engaged in efforts to enable and prolong reckless borrowing, and this included heavy lobbying to prevent effective regulation, after all one of the roles of the State is to help its citizens avoid bad decisions]
We bay for tougher regulation, though not of ourselves.
As part of my Shuttleworth Fellowship I’m preparing quarterly reviews of what I and the Open Knowledge Foundation have been up to. So, herewith are some some highlights from the last 3 months.
Major new project support including:
Won several competitive bids to deliver data portals with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN Data management System
The DataHub passed 3000 datasets in early January and is nearing 3300
BibServer and BibSoup, our bibliogrpahic software and service, reached beta and have been receiving increasing attention
Public Domain Review celebrated its 1st Birthday. Some stats:
Initiated a substantive collaboration on the PyBossa crowdsourcing platform with Shuttleworth Fellow Emeritus Francois Grey and his Citizen Cyberscience Centre
Annotator and AnnotateIt v1.0 Completed and Released
Working groups have continued to develop well:
Rapid Chapter and local group development:
Participated in numerous events and meetings including:
