Where do your state taxes go?

Posted by Philip Anselmo on August 1, 2008 - 3:24pm
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A new Web site called See Through NY promises to deliver "a clearer view of how ... state and local tax dollars are spent" by quite literally connecting users with the state's financial tax data. Launched by the Empire Center for New York State Policy on Thursday, the site has already made quite a splash. When I visited it this morning, it took about ten minutes to load because the site traffic has been so overwhelming.

All visits to the site today come with this disclaimer:

Due to heavy traffic, SeeThroughNY is experiencing technical difficulties and may be performing slowly.  We apologize for this inconvenience and are taking every step to correct these issues as quickly as possible.

We anticipate full functionality by mid-day on Friday, if not sooner.

It's pretty simple to use the site. Say you want to find out about how much money a state employee earns. Click on the bright green Payrolls button, follow the links to search the state payroll database, and... Voila! Or, at least, it would be voila if the search wasn't "timed out" after every effort to browse the salaries of the legislative branch, for example.

You can do the same for information on Contracts and Expenditures — and the data seems comprehensive — when the site is working, that is.

An article from the Johnson News Service, published in today's Daily News goes a little more in depth, behind the scenes. Reporter Tom Wanamaker talks with several people, including a municipal journalist's best friend, Robert Freeman, the executive director of the state Committee on Open Government.

"Thirty years ago, 'high-tech' meant electric typewriters and carbon paper," Freeman told Wanamaker. Freeman went on to call the site a "treasure trove of information on how public money is spent."

Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, hopes the site will spark a "rich debate about how governments spend taxpayer money."

Just a thought: The timing for the site's launch seems almost too perfect considering the governor's recent announcement that the state will need to start cutting staff and services to avoid a complete fiscal meltdown. We can now see in the barest and most unforgiving of languages — mathematics — just how each and every person, project and contract stacks up. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing?

Posted by Mark Potwora on August 1, 2008 - 3:36pm
Thanks Howard for getting this up...
Posted by Russ Stresing on August 1, 2008 - 4:56pm
The information on the site includes the salaries of not just six figure superintendents and commission members, but also makes public the base salaries of nurse's aides that care for our veterans, janitors who clean up the bathrooms in the court houses and state buildings, part-time summer employees who empty garbage cans at state parks, and our state police officers.

The organization sponsoring the site, The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, advocates the privatization of government services and has tried to rally public opinion in favor of the neo-conservative agenda that gave us the Iraq war and the Justice Department political screening. http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=manhattan+i... And the funding they received from the tobacco companies was in exchange for papers in their defense.

I'm sure there's a segment of the population that resents every public employee for the salary and benefits they receive for the performance of their duties. Myself, I couldn't do what nurse's aides and state troopers do. I don't really think making their earnings public helps us clean up or streamline government. I think this site is more an effort to advance the Institute's political agenda than it is to advance good government.
Posted by Howard Owens on August 1, 2008 - 7:42pm
Privatizing isn't a particular neoconservative position. Neoconservatives are primarily focused on foreign affairs and have little concern for domestic issues. Paleoconservatives tend to be focused more on domestic issues (and tend to be isolationists).

However, privatizing is more of a traditional conservative (classic liberal) or libertarian concern.

Privatizing also goes hand-in-hand with localism, because it is a good thing to devolve central control to municipalities, neighborhoods and families.
Posted by Russ Stresing on August 1, 2008 - 8:00pm
How far do we carry privatizing? And the Institute surely does espouse neoconservative policy. I didn't conflate the two.
I don't agree that universal or wide-spread localism is a good thing. I think the consolidation of government when it means combining duplicate services is the only sure way to really address our budget problems. I think that turning back the clock to solve our problems can't work in the face of national and global realities. Its nostalgic, no doubt, but it smacks too much to me of an isolationist attitude. The more people meet more people, the less insular we become and the more considering we are of new ideas and solutions.