Here is a NYT article that explains what USAFacts.org is:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-ballmer-serves-up-a-fascinating-data-trove.html?_r=0&referer=https://t.co/a4Y8D8bncI" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...</a><p>> On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
I'm seeing many things (if this data is accurate, which assuming it is as it's from all government sources) and trends that go against a large percentage of what the media on both sides are perpetuating. That is my first takeaway at a glance.<p>My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclusion. The way Social Security works is not sustainable. Period. Something has to give. A $405 B shortfall on SS in 2015. If that was at least half, we would actually not be running a deficit. We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept.<p>A quick third take away seems to be the unprecedented rise in non-cash government aid (food stamps) during the Obama administration. The data is there, needs more analyzing of course.<p>Lastly, it seems that Government revenue for Federal and State/Local has actually increased pretty linearly with the population. Despite all the different changes in the income tax rate/other progressive taxes. This supports an overhaul to the tax code to a more simple, flat tax system. From another data source outside this report, I'd have to find it, but historically, no matter the top bracket tax rate, the Federal government collects about 15-17 % income tax. Including when the top rate was 90%+.<p>As far as the presentation, my favorite part is each piece of government data is tied to 4 distinct duties of government outlined in the Constitution. That's pretty brilliant.
This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources.<p>Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions.<p>The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn!<p>From the NYT [1]:<p><pre><code> Want to know how many police officers are employed in various
parts of the country and compare that against crime rates?
Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets
and the cost to collect?
Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed
depression and how much the government spends on it?
That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
</code></pre>
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing source data on the site. There are high-level charts and PDF reports so far.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-ballmer-serves-up-a-fascinating-data-trove.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...</a>
I'm intrigued by the way they broke down the top-level categories for Federal spending: they used Constitutional phrases, which I haven't seen used this way before (at least not exact quotes, which look so antiquated): <a href="https://usafacts.org/the-big-picture?return_to=%2Fgovernment-finances&view=spending" rel="nofollow">https://usafacts.org/the-big-picture?return_to=%2Fgovernment...</a><p>I know a lot of people would argue (reasonably) that all government spending should be clearly categorizable under such things, but not that they <i>are</i>.<p>It reminds me of the "ends policy monitoring" used by a non-profit I'm involved in. The staff pulls out each clause in our end goal ("Ends") policy and breaks down our activities based on those categories.<p>I'm wondering if this is something Ballmer got from corporate governance. It was new to me when we first started doing it. At any rate, I like it.
Before anyone goes putting a ton of trust in these charts...<p>Compare the following:
<a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815</a> vs <a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966</a><p>In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year?<p>( imgur link to screenshots in case the links don't work: <a href="http://imgur.com/a/tY02j" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/tY02j</a> )
Can anyone give me some intuition into why 77k people are employed by the Social Security Administration? [1]
That's bigger than Google, and I didn't think their scope was that wide.<p>[1] <a href="http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?comparison=by_government_type&government_type=combined&table=employment--number-of-employees&year=2014" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?compariso...</a> under "Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity". The combined count is "n/a" - maybe that's because the State & Local count has some overlap with the Federal count? So I took the maximum of the two.
"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises."<p>Had anyone made the comic strip version?<p>Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans?<p>Steve: that's what the government is for.<p>Wife: I thought you might say that so I ran the numbers.<p>Steve: hmm, I'm not agreeing with your interpretation. I think we're going to have to do additional modeling.<p>USAfacts was born.<p>Months later...<p>Wife: are we ready to really help the poor?<p>Steve: this data is fascinating!
It's a nice effort, but I'm disheartened at the lack of labeling for sourcing, as if the source (nevermind the methodology of collection) is subordinate or ancillary to the data itself. There is a massive difference between stats (and taxonomy) collected by local jurisdictions and, say, by the FBI. I know it's a beta, but it's not as if source labels are some optional feature when it comes to the integrity of data.<p>edit: Exhibit A: Firearms licenses<p><a href="http://imgur.com/a/IggVx" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/IggVx</a><p>Where did this data come from? What kind of firearms? What kind of licenses? This data is absolutely useless without context.
What a cool service. The spending by our country (and the associated deficits and debt) shouldn't have to be a partisan issue clouded by smoke and mirrors and political handwringing.<p>I didn't care much for how Ballmer ran Microsoft (except for his developer conference chants), but I'm really warming to the post-Microsoft Steve Ballmer.
Dear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of <a href="https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016" rel="nofollow">https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016</a>.<p>- Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all public benefit corporations. If they spend our money we have the right to see their budgets.<p>- Governmental organisations borrow money outside of the government budget(!). This increases the government debt but does not show in the deficit. Just because the deficit is smaller than last year does not mean the debt is not growing faster.<p>- There is a world outside the US. The internet needs a one time stop for all public spending of the world, not just the US. Also you may want to connect the government receipts and expenditures from/to the international organisations, OSN, World Bank, the foreign aid etc.<p>- Public spending and receipts do not follow a tree hierarchy, it is a pseudograph. You will have to deal with so called offsetting receipts, extra budgetary fees, negative expenditures, positive taxes, transfers between organisations etc. We believe the only suitable visualisation style is a sankey diagram.<p>- There are huge size differences between individual budget items. Inside the executive branch you do not want to hide the $3 million sent to Marine Mammal Commission (<a href="https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f224f7560" rel="nofollow">https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f22...</a>) but you can not realistically show it next to the $7.52 billion sent to the Railroad Retirement Board (<a href="https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3caea97da" rel="nofollow">https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3ca...</a>). We solved this by a zoomable interface. (They call it the universe of public spending so let's give them a map!)<p>- The federal government does not even have a definite list of all governmental agencies. I am not kidding.<p>- You will never get all the data but you could build a wiki platform where city officials, school principals, government employees etc contribute with their bits and pieces. They can connect their receipts to the spendings of the superior organisations. If it does not match, citizens can investigate why. (If you want ordinary people to contribute with data you may need a human friendly editor too.)<p>- Different data dimensions will be useful to different people. Show the spending by agency, by programme, by function, by geography, by source etc. Let people combine the dimensions and create custom aggregates.<p>- Let people seamlessly share custom views and comparisons to social media (with relevant OG tags). We have a fake news industry to fight.<p>We wish you best luck.
I'm frustrated that the plots are not accompanied by definitions. In the US population charts, what is meant by divorce rate? Also I have no idea what "currently married" means.[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://usafacts.org/us-population" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/us-population</a>
Is there some common data feed interchange format that can share arbitrary data feeds in arbitrary structures between data sources like this and statistical programs like R or data analysis programs like Mathematica (or Wolfram Alpha)? Kind of like a CSV for the web age?<p>A use case I'm thinking of as an example is on the data source web site I construct a data feed that is represented by a URI to a data feed, consisting of say headers, columns and rows in a table data structure. I paste the URI into R, which pulls it over the wire and then analyzes the data, instead of me downloading the feed and massaging the data into a format ingestible by R. Ideally the format comes out of the box supporting some common data structures like tables and directed graphs, and lets users/developers create their own data structures.<p>Bonus points for the format supporting differential, incremental updates of previously-downloaded cached feeds.
Graduation rate seems awfully low, at 59% in 2012.<p><a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/34352" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/34352</a><p>--I do not think this is accurate.--<p>Edit: this is the college graduation rate. I assumed it was high school. Page needs more info!
There is a Visas granted metric. But it is not clear if that is just any type of visa? I would be interested in number of citizenships granted.<p><a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/25906" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/25906</a>
There is no such thing as a politically neutral fact these days. Where leadership is based on fantastical assertions pulled from the air, the machine measuring daily rainfall is a partisan political pundit to be attacked and sidelined at will. Fact-reporting organizations are moot when those in power care only for opinion and "gut". While i support such efforts, I fear that at the current moment our problems are too fundimental for them to have any net impact.
Compare to <a href="http://www.usgovernmentspending.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.usgovernmentspending.com</a> and associated sites
Funny that a site run by ex-Microsoft CEO doesn't use the MS stack:
<a href="https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fusafacts.org" rel="nofollow">https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fusafacts.org</a>
An article/thread about Steve Ballmer and the origins of this project is here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081</a>.
The site isn’t going to mean anything unless people in power use it for their decisions about policy.<p>I sometimes think that half the reason political polarization has gotten so bad is that politicians aren’t citing the same data. One lobbying group can provide one dataset, and that’ll get picked up by Democrats to support their idea. Another lobbying group will provide another dataset, and that’ll get used by Republicans for their counterarguments.<p>If this site could become the definitive source of data—the one that both sides of the aisle trust—there’d be a common data source in policy talks. That could lead to consensus much quicker.
What's with the spikes every tenth year on the "population changes" graphs? <a href="http://usafacts.org/us-population" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/us-population</a>
Wait, what? This claims there are 133,564 people currently married in the US, out of a population of 321,418,820. That's 0.04% of the population. Are married.
Unfortunately they only give references to their sources, rather than the actual original sources. This might be hard to recreate. Perhaps even impossible.<p>I imagine Steve Balmer opens more doors and gets more cooperation than any of us here would get in accessing the same data.<p>Edit: It seems they're in the process of documenting the processes and methods they used to obtain their datasets. When this is released it could be a very useful tool.
note: the expenditures and revenues suggest the net calc here is opposite what it should be <a href="http://usafacts.org/government-finances/government-run-businesses?comparison=by_years&government_type=combined&table=grb--all--combined&year=2014" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/government-finances/government-run-busin...</a>
The site claims that 100% of payroll taxes are Federal.<p>It looks like they missed San Francisco's Payroll Expense tax <a href="http://sftreasurer.org/2016-gross-receipts-tax-payroll-expense-tax-online-filing-instructions" rel="nofollow">http://sftreasurer.org/2016-gross-receipts-tax-payroll-expen...</a><p>Maybe I am misunderstanding how this tax works though.
The population charts (<a href="http://usafacts.org/us-population" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/us-population</a>) are interesting. It looks like the government continually underestimated the population, resulting in the "spikes" as each Census brought numbers up toward reality
It seems like a lot of the historical data is complicated by inflation (like the growth in productivity per capita is interesting, but how much is it in real vs. nominal dollars?), but at a glance it doesn't seem to be accounted for.
Here is a video of said character: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY&t=12s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY&t=12s</a>
Civilian deaths from fires had a big anomaly in 2001.... I assume that was 9/11?<p><a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/15818" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/15818</a>
By restricting the project to data provided by governments there is absolutely zero chance of much additional accountability being offered by this platform.<p>I think all recipients of public funds should be required to account for all spending per hour, project and employee, and should also publish highly granular KPI and transactional data.<p>I don't necessarily want to see a 10-K, I want access to google analytics, the ERP system, and the financial ledger.<p>It should be possible for anyone with a copy of OpenOffice to determine the cost of the top 10% of patients at any public hospital, the cost of all high level "missions" the US Military is involved in, and the Federal employees who have received the most disciplinary action (or the most complaints).
My take-away is that this is a very 'raw' deployment. i.e. Hopefully they maintain and change this to something much more informative and authoritative over time.
What the heck is this?<p><a href="http://usafacts.org/metrics/11699" rel="nofollow">http://usafacts.org/metrics/11699</a>
I was suuuper excited about this. But this site is cringeworthy, even for a beta, given they spent $10 million on this effort.<p>For one, the division into the constitutional categories is kind of awkward; most people would just like to see by function or department. When the drafters of the constitution wrote these clauses into the constitution, they had no sense that one day the government would be so large or do so many things. It is anachronistic to impose these clauses on a modern state. If everything the government does is somehow serving some role in the US constitution, isn't it kind of funny that virtually all democratic countries provide more or less the same services? The only major difference between the US, with its special constitution, and other democracies' spending is that the US government only <i>directly</i> provides health insurance to about half the population, and the US government spends more on defense and security. I don't think that difference is because of the constitution, but rather historical/cultural factors and randomness. So the application of the constitution simply reflects some kind of delusion on Ballmer's part.<p>Second, the data is sloppily put together. There is a line for "Social insurance administration" which includes federal and local employees but has no combined federal and local total. Then there is another line for "Social Insurance Administration (federal)" which has no federal/local breakdown but has a total. So are there no local social insurance workers? Why not just put everything in one line?<p>Third, this is almost entirely data you could get from the federal reserve's FRED system. In some cases you might need to go to the OECD site or the BLS site. But I'm left wondering: how did they spend years on this? This is more like an extended hackathon project. The data vis really sucks, too.
$12,536 - "paid in taxes by the average single parent in 2015"<p>Noticed that on the front page. That's about as silly as referencing the average household net worth in the US, or the average income - both of which are astronomical due to how well off the top 1/3 are. Show me the median taxes paid.
I'm actually more suspicious of anything claiming to be "non-partisan" than something that wears its foundational beliefs on its sleeves. At least if something says "We are a Libertarian non-profit" or "We are a Socialist non-profit" or something like that, I know better what specific grain of salt to use when reading its materials.<p>Anything that claims to be non-profit is merely hiding the slant that its people have put on the data it is providing. The idea that anything can be presented free of the biases introduced by the people presenting it is a silly myth. Which is not to say people shouldn't make an effort to be fair and unbiased when trying to present facts, but we all have inherent biases that are basically impossible for us to remove ourselves.
And of course, USAFacts' interpretation of the responsibilities of government are right out of the liberal progressive manifesto... but I think that is the way the data need to be reported, because there is no Constitutional anchor-point for 2/3rds of what the US Federal Gov't actually does.