Elsewhere, people seem to have read a different budget estimate than the one we saw. Two elements of the discussion show a growing disconnect between Oklahoma’s budgetary politics and reality.

First, Governor Mary Fallin and many others continue to advocate for reduction or elimination of the state income tax. A closer look at the budget shows that, of the $400 million forecast revenue growth from FY ’11 to FY ’13, fully  half comes from the income tax. Overall, the income tax is expected to provide $2.5 billion next year for General Revenue, the HB 1017 Education Reform Fund, and the ROADS Fund, which has helped restore the worst of our roads and bridges. Cutting this vital revenue support makes no budget sense. It also makes no economic sense.

Second, the budget “shortfall” was reported as $150 million, the rough difference between revenue growth and loss of one-time budget boosters in the FY ’12 budget. But the shortfall in meeting our public needs is much greater. To determine this, we would have to start with the $600 million difference between the budget for FY ’09, when the recession began, and the estimate for FY ’13. A more realistic calculation would also add at least $100 million for the increase in the cost of providing services over the last four years. So the true budget shortfall is closer to $700 million, not $150 million.  Our recent forecast indicates we won’t reach this level until FY ’15, if we keep the current revenue structure.

And even that calculation is deeply flawed, in that it assumes the FY ’09 level of service should be the target. However, in FY ’08, the most recent available year, Oklahoma state and local governments spent 18 percent less than the national average and ranked 43rd among the states in spending. At least monthly, a new national ranking puts Oklahoma among the bottom states in health, education, transportation, or environment and shows the impact of this chronic under-investment. Our state’s economic and social viability are being eroded by poor budget decisions.

Measuring shortfalls against last year’s budget is a not-so-subtle way of assuming that last year’s budget was the correct one. That could be the case, but probably is not. Instead of letting the available revenue define the budget, Oklahoma should define the budget by the cost of providing the services that are needed to educate children, protect seniors, reduce poverty, maintain infrastructure, and promote economic growth. Current services budgeting and pay-as-you-go policies are used by many states to help define budgetary needs and hold elected officials accountable for whether and how they choose to meet those needs.

Adopting these important reforms would be the right way to begin to get our fiscal house back in order. Cutting income taxes can and should wait until we’ve worked harder at defining what we want and need our state government to do and developed a realistic plan for how to pay for it.

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“An Incomplete Recovery” sums up the forecast part of the story. These are the key findings:

• The General Revenue Fund (GRF), which makes up 76 percent of the state’s budget in FY ’12, will continue its slow recovery. As we discussed here, GRF revenue has now grown over the prior year for 18 straight months. Unfortunately, revenue still remains 15.9 percent below the peak levels of FY ’09. Our forecasts indicate it will be two more years, FY ’14, before GRF revenues reach pre-recession levels.
• Much of the revenue decline and subsequent slow recovery can be attributed to the severe economic downturn, but not all. Our forecasts show that decisions already made by prior legislatures, including income tax cuts, diverting revenues for road construction, and reinstating tax credits that were suspended during the worst of the downturn, will reduce revenues substantially between now and FY ’15.
• It will take some time for growth in the GRF to make up for loss of federal assistance, Rainy Day Fund monies and other non-recurring revenues that partially sustained the budget in FY ’10-’12. As shown in the graph below, we expect the FY ’13 budget to be just $160 million, or 2.5 percent, above the FY ’12 budget. Even by FY ’15, our most likely projection for the total budget is $7.52 billion. That’s only 5.5 percent over the budget six years earlier in FY ’09.

Thus, Oklahoma’s state government is poised not for real recovery, but for continued stagnation. When the budget finally exceeds the pre-downturn level, it will not even begin to support the services we offered before the recession. Inflation has increased the cost of services, population growth has increased the demand, and changing demographics (mainly an aging population) will create significant burdens on many services. At the same time, deficit reduction efforts  in Washington will is likely to increase fiscal stress on the states.

The rest of the story is our recommendations for dealing with the incomplete recovery. We advocate for a package of reforms that will allow state government to restore our economic and social well-being. These include:

• Creating a revenue structure that supports adequate, effective, and essential public services. We can do this by protecting the income tax against further deterioration, reducing wasteful and inefficient tax credits and exemptions, revitalizing the sales tax for the 21st century economy, and adopting combined reporting to equalize the tax burden between local businesses and large corporations.
• Implementing current services budgeting to help legislators and the public understand whether a proposed funding level for a particular service would expand it, shrink it, or keep it at its current level.  This can improve government efficiency by providing a regular, thorough examination of each program’s costs.
• Adopting PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) limitations that require policymakers to pay for the cost of any reduction in revenues or expansion of services.  Paying for these policy changes could take the form either of a revenue increase or cuts to other services. The undesirable alternative is to promise tax cuts or increased services and then not be able to deliver because the money isn’t there. See this post for more on current services budgeting and PAYGO.
• Instituting a formal long-range forecasting process so that we aren’t continually surprised by revenue fluctuations and so we can better understand whether current revenues are sufficient to support services.

Next month the state will release its first official revenue estimate for FY ’13. We should respond to that estimate with resolve to create and use new tools to keep our services viable and our economy competitive. The alternative – annual budget decisions that ignore the real costs of state services, hide fiscal impacts in future years, and define budgets by what we have instead of what we need –  has not served the state well through the downturn. It will work even worse in the incomplete recovery.

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Good forecasting starts with a sober look back at previous efforts. We first undertook the forecasting project in 2009, in response to rapidly falling state revenues. Our first forecast brief, released in November of that year, used six different models to forecast state General Revenue Fund (GRF) revenues for four years (here’s a summary of how those forecasts are developed). With the books now complete on FY ’11, we can look back to judge how we did and compare our performance with the official projections certified by the Board of Equalization.

The graph below compares all of our forecasts and official state estimates to the actual revenue.  Note that we’ve added a red bar to the first three forecasts in order  to show the $309 million in net new revenues adopted by the Legislature during the FY ’11 budget process. Neither OK Policy or the Board of Equalization could have known these would be adopted in making the early forecasts.   Adjusting for these changes, our initial forecast was the highest. It also proved to be the most accurate–just $94 million, or 2 percent, below actual revenues. The state’s official estimates moved up slowly throughout the period but remained well below the actual result. Adjusting for later revenue law changes, the first official estimate was $380 million, or 7 percent, below the actual revenue. The final estimate, more than halfway through the year, was still $188 million, or 4 percent, below the mark.

Looking back has helped us not only to better understand the dynamics of revenue and forecasting, but also to appreciate the changing dynamics of the budget cycle. When we started this project two years ago, we wanted to get a better picture of how far revenue would fall, for how long, and what the recovery might look like. Now that economic recovery, however halting, has set in, we need to turn our attention to whether the resulting revenue growth will make up for the end of one-time revenue fixes that balanced the last two budgets, as well as estimating how much revenue growth we can expect for how long. Our prior efforts have suggested that revenue will not return to pre-downturn levels until FY ’13 or ’14.

The need for better and longer-range forecasting has not diminished. We’ll incorporate what we’ve learned into work that’s now underway on developing new FY ’12-’15 forecasts. The state can do the same in preparing the Board of Equalization estimates for December. As always, we encourage a more inclusive and transparent forecasting process, and we implore both executive and legislative leaders to create an official long-term forecasting process.

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Overall, the average Oklahoman pays $992 less in state and local taxes than the average American. The gap has grown from $854 in two years. The difference is mostly in the individual income tax, where phased reductions have lowered taxed for almost all Oklahomans, while cutting the state’s budget by over $750 million a year. As the graph indicates, Oklahomans pay less of every type of tax, except “Other,” which includes gross production taxes on oil and gas, a revenue source not available to most states. The difference is particularly dramatic for the property tax; Oklahomans pay less than half the national average. Oklahomans may very close to the national average in general sales taxes.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Oklahoma ranked 40th among the states in 2008, both in taxes per person and in taxes as a share of income. As the Guide shows, we rank in the bottom half of the states for every tax except the sales tax (22nd) and other taxes (7th, for reasons discussed above).

The Guide indicates that government in Oklahoma is affordable. But the more important question is this: Can we afford cheap government? The Expenditures section of the Guide shows how Oklahoma compares in accomplishments. This year-old data does not tell a story of success. Mostly it’s a story of people doing too little to support the public structures that make society work effectively. We’ll be updating the rankings and grades in this section shortly as well. If our rankings got better in the last year or two, while our taxes got lower, then we’ll have something to be proud of. We’ll also be very surprised. If, as we expect, Oklahoma continues to lag behind almost every state in health, education, infrastructure, and public safety, we’d like to think we’ll start questioning the current wisdom that lower taxes are always the appropriate goal.

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1. Low rates of working and low wage rates. Only 83 percent of working-age adults had full-time jobs in 2008, down from 89 percent in 1980. The rate is dramatically lower, 42 percent, for African-Americal males. Haskins attributes the increase for that group in part to higher incarceration rates and blames relatively generous welfare and retirement systems for some of the general decline in working rate. At the same time, low- and middle-income workers are not seeing meaningful gains in wages.
2. Changing family composition. The marriage rate has declined greatly, mainly for less-educated women. Forty-one percent of births are now to single mothers, almost all of them with less than a college education. Given the clear link between single-mother family status and child poverty, Haskins suggested higher marriage rates would reduce poverty.
3. Low educational attainment and poor outcomes. Income of adults who don’t attend college  typically tracks closely with their parents’ income, but the relationship breaks down for adult children with a college education. Because poor children have low rates of college attendance and completion, few will be able to break this cycle.
4. Immigration. While we admit many highly-educated and successful immigrants, the majority of immigrants have very low education attainment. Haskins claims this in itself adds 0.5 percentage points or more to the poverty rate.

Haskins sums up his findings and frames his solutions with this relatively simple statistic: If you finish high school, work full time, and wait until you are married and 21 years old to have a child, your chances of being below the poverty line are 2 percent. If you don’t finish high school, don’t work full time, and have a child before you’re married and 21, your chances of being poor are 74 percent.

Haskins prescribes a three-pronged approach to reducing poverty. First, we should increase educational attainment and performance by investing in education from early childhood through higher education. Second, we should get more Americans working full-time by encouraging work. He credits the Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare reform with moving in the right direction and claims they have helped increase income for many families, especially low-income female-headed ones. He suggests we need to go further in requiring work to participate in food and housing benefit programs, investing more in vocational education and employment-related training for adults, and investing more in child care. Third, we should encourage marriage; Haskins admitted there are effective programs developed that will do this but suggests we need to develop them. He and coauthor Isabel Sawhill offer specific recommendations, and a plan to pay for them, in Creating an Opportunity Society.

Haskins’ lecture was thought-provoking and generated a lively discussion. There’s something in his approach to make most observers happy and to make most unhappy as well. In an environment where public investment in welfare and education programs often brings disappointing results, it is certainly worth exploring different approaches. We commend DHS for bringing Haskins to Oklahoma and providing a forum for a much-needed exchange on important long-term issues facing our nation and state. Guests for the spring lecture series include Oklahoma Health Care Authority Chief Executive Officer Michael Fogarty, speaking on the economics of health care reform, UCLA’s Adriana Lleras-Muney on “Education and Health: What do we Know?,” updates from nationally renowned program evaluators, and other great programs. You can find a schedule and description here.

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We can choose to keep on emptying the revenue stream, spending on favored programs without demanding results, and taking life one fiscal year at a time, as we have through many years. Or we can choose to reevaluate our environment and craft a new fiscal approach that values good planning, effective spending, and generating sufficient revenue to make Oklahoma smarter, safer, and more competitive. We must choose wisely.

The forecasts indicate that Oklahoma is entering a period of economic recovery and that state revenues will stop falling and grow modestly. However, the state is not returning to the days of the mid-2000s when annual revenue growth sometimes approached 20 percent. Instead, we face a short-term outlook in which overall budgets are falling or flat; in FY ’14, three budget cycles from now, we project that the budget will still be less than FY ’08. The graph below shows how far budgets of the near future are likely to fall below those of the recent past.

Because our legal structure demands it and our political system encourages it, the Governor, Legislature, state agencies, and media will likely focus on just the first year of this multi-year problem. They’ll face a significant challenge in doing so, as our forecasts suggests the total budget will be nearly $400 million (6 percent) below the adopted FY ’11 budget. In facing that challenge, however, we should demand more than one-time fixes and budget cuts that assume (wrongly) that agencies can somehow keep absorbing reductions without real and long-lasting impacts on all Oklahomans. We should expect action that shows an appreciation for the effects of serial budget cutting, unwise erosion of the revenue base, and failure to think ahead.

Here’s what we think would constitute a wise approach to budgeting in the upcoming session:

• Acknowledge and investigate the impacts of two straight years of significant budget cuts before embarking on a third. Oklahoma’s education, health, mental health, environment, economic well-being and safety have been unacceptably compromised by these cuts. Instead of reflexively making (and quietly accepting) more cuts, it’s time to find and draw the line that a civilized society would not cross.
• Act now to bolster revenue for this year and future years. The reduction in the top income tax rate, which will be triggered under a law adopted back when the state enjoyed unprecedented revenue growth, should be delayed or repealed.  Many of the short-term revenue fixes adopted last session, including deferring tax credits and exemptions, should be retained for at least three years and some should be made permanent. Other tax exemptions should be systematically reviewed; they should be retained only if they demonstrably improve our economy and society more than the public services we lose by retaining them. We also need to find a sustainable funding source for the growing and essential Medicaid program, before it consumes more of the state’s limited resources.
• Spend more wisely. We should combine agencies and programs where it is economical and feasible and shift spending toward programs that will pay off in reduced costs in the long term. Take control over our future finances by integrating multi-year forecasting into all major budget decisions, requiring fiscal impact analyses of all significant legislative actions, require that laws that cost revenue or increase spending be paid for by offsetting savings or new revenue, and establish larger and more efficient reserves so that future downturns are less devastating than we have allowed this one to become.
• Create a budget process and structure that better supports sound and responsible financial planning and management. We should expand our forecasting capacities, adopt pay-go budgeting requirements, and continue to strengthen our reserve funds.

Our fiscal environment has changed, probably permanently. The sooner we recognize the change and craft a budget approach that fits the new reality, the more likely our state can sustain the public services that citizens demand and deserve.

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1. To help state leaders, agencies, and citizens better understand and prepare for the impacts of the FY ’10 budget shortfall;
2. To encourage the legislature and governor to develop a cohesive plan for managing the shortfall while minimizing impacts on  services that Oklahomans depend on;
3. To better understand how long the revenue downturn would last and the path back to normal revenue levels; and
4. To encourage the state to build better forecasting and financial planning into the budget process.

Our forecasting brief summarized our forecasts and recommendations. This post looks back at how well those forecasts worked.

The graph below suggests that our efforts were generally on target. The graph shows our six forecasts, along with the “middle scenario” and the actual revenue the state received. (Our technical memorandum describes how each forecast was devised.)

Actual General Revenue Fund (GRF) revenues for FY ’10 (which ended June 30, 2010) were $4.6 billion, as shown on the right-hand bar of the graph. Actual revenues were 15 percent below the original appropriation and a 17 percent drop from the previous year.  Our forecasts, which were based on the first three months of the year, showed a very wide range of $3.8 to $5.3 billion, with a middle scenario of $4.44 billion.

The first goal, to improve understanding of the situation and inform legislative action, requires that forecasts early in the year be reasonably accurate. Here’s how we fared on that count:

• The middle scenario, which we suggested should be the basis for legislative planning, was 3.5 percent under the actual revenue.
• Three of our six forecasts came within $160 million (less than 4 percent) of actual revenue. Interestingly, all three were exceedingly simple forecasts. Scenario 1 just assumed that revenue would bottom out in the second quarter of the year and then recover at the same rate that it had fallen over the previous year. Scenario 3 assumed a repeat of the 2002 downturn, but with greater depth. Scenario 4 assumed that the revenue from the first three months would be the same proportion of annual revenue as it had been in previous years.
• The other three forecasts were off by more than $400 million. Two of these, scenarios 5 and 6, used projections of economic growth and natural gas prices to project revenue. While our models fit what had happened up until FY ’09 quite well, they did not work well for FY ’10. The other forecast that missed the mark, Scenario 2, assumed that revenues would stay at the bottom for another quarter, which, thankfully, proved not to be the case.

We can claim partial success on our other goals. While the seven-month wait for legislative action was painful, the Governor and Legislature acted early in the session to adjust budgets and to use Rainy Day Fund and additional stimulus funds, as we had recommended, to help make up for falling GRF revenue. They seemed to embrace our second and third goals by planning the FY ’11 budget with an understanding that recovery would be slow, as we had forecast, and that FY ’12 would be just as difficult due to continued slow growth and falling stimulus revenue.

Results were mixed for our final goal, to improve forecasting and financial planning. The official forecasting process is unchanged. Legislation introduced by Rep. Ryan Keisel,  HB 2796, which would have required new Board of Equalization forecasts during revenue shortfalls and created a broader and more transparent forecasting process, failed to receive a hearing. The legislature made some progress toward our recommendations to reserve more revenue for future downturns by passing HB 3032 to create a new reserve from gross production taxes, but the bill was vetoed by Governor Henry.  The legislature also put State Question 757 on this November’s ballot, so voters can choose to increase the maximum amount of the Rainy Day Fund from 10 percent of General Revenue collections to 15 percent.

During the coming months we’ll develop new forecasts for FY ’11 through FY ’14. We’ll continue to advocate for more frequent and transparent forecasts and for wise reserve policies.

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As state leaders grapple with the short-term challenges of bringing the budgets for this year and next into balance, it is not too early to draw lessons from the current state fiscal crisis to design policies that will allow us to respond better the next time the economy falters. This post, the third in a series that will recommend changes to our budget and tax system, looks at options for putting multi-year commitments on hold during downturns. Our first post recommended enhanced and expanded budget forecasting; the second looked at strengthening reserve funds. The final piece will consider tax expenditures. Our proposals are all intended to enhance the Legislature’s ability to manage budget downturns without having to implement deep cuts to vital state services or enact tax increases.

Time-delayed tax cuts and spending obligations enacted several years ago include the following:

• In 2006 the Legislature increased the standard deduction from the state personal income tax over four years. The last and largest of the phased increases takes effect in tax year 2010 and will reduce tax revenue by almost $100 million in FY ’11 and every year after.
• The same 2006 tax cut law also phased in reductions in the top income tax rate. The rate has fallen from 6.75 percent to 5.50 percent. It is scheduled to be reduced to 5.25 percent in the first year in which revenues are forecast to increase by four percent or more, likely in FY ’12. This will reduce revenue by over $100 million per year.
• In 2006, the Legislature also voted to phase out the estate tax. The tax ends for deaths after December 31, 2009. While estate tax returns will still flow in over the next year, the elimination of the tax reduces revenue by close to $30 million starting in FY ’11.
• Also in FY ’06, the Legislature created the Rebuilding Oklahoma Access and Driver Safety (ROADS) program. It was funded by reapportioning a growing amount of tax revenue from the General Revenue Fund to the ROADS fund. This will reduce GRF revenues by an additional $30 million each year from FY ’11 through FY ’13 and in later years.
• In 2007, the Legislature created a permanent funding source for the OHLAP scholarship program, known as Oklahoma’s Promise. Each year the Regents for Higher Education are required to estimate the cost of this program and the Board of Equalization is required to set aside funding before any other state function is funded.  It is likely that by FY ’13 more funding will have to shift from the General Revenue Fund to Oklahoma’s Promise.

Cumulatively, these already-adopted revenue changes are estimated to cost some $300 million by FY ’13. At a time when revenue collections are falling or struggling to rebound to pre-downturn levels, these obligations decided by prior Legislatures will require deeper cuts to core budgets and delay the restoration of programs and services.

There are two approaches that could help avert future occurrences of this situation. The first would be for the Legislature to make all future phased-in tax cuts and earmarked revenue allocations contingent on sufficient revenue growth and a return to pre-downturn budget levels. There are precedents for this kind of approach, including the trigger mechanism in place for the impending cut in the top income tax rate to 5.25 percent. Triggers should become standard practice, and the trigger should be tied not only to year-to-year revenue growth but also to revenues returning to pre-downturn levels. Otherwise, we are likely to see a situation where tax cuts will kick in during the first year of a recovery, when service levels are still far from having been fully restored.

A more comprehensive approach to aligning revenues and spending obligations would be to adopt some form of pay-go provision, as is currently required for federal legislation. Under pay-go, all new tax cuts or spending commitments must be budget neutral, meaning they must be fully paid for with spending cuts or new revenues over a multi-year period, unlike currently, where tax cuts, tax credits, and spending obligations can have significant back-loaded fiscal impacts. Such a requirement would promote fiscal discipline and help minimize the severity of the long-term fiscal gap, where annual revenue growth is inadequate to fund the ongoing cost of services.  Best of all, perhaps, pay-go would mean that the hard choices of aligning revenues and expenditures could not simply be left for the next legislature to deal with.

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The STAR Coalition of organizations promoting accountability in the recovery praised this effort:

Our groups can now follow the money in ways they never could before and will use it to engage their policy-makers and build a recovery that benefit communities. We will also use the data to actively engage the public to better understand how the Recovery Act is impacting our communities, and how taxpayers can advocate to improve the Recovery Act and other government investments in the future.

The coalition expressed some reservations about the reporting effort, especially as it treats jobs. There are some great features to stimulus reporting and I think it’s worth your time to look around. On this page is a great national summary that tells you which states are getting jobs and spending money, and how far along the projects are (not very). This map will help you learn more about ARRA’s impact on Oklahoma. So far it’s  saved or created 8,764 jobs, according to the agencies and companies that were awarded funding. The map even lets you find projects in your own neighborhood by entering your zip code. There’s also a good state summary page.

Unless you are smarter and/or more stubborn than I, however, there are also lots of things you can’t find. If you want one list of all the grants and contracts in Oklahoma, you have your work cut out. The two options I saw were either to browse through hundreds of pages of grants without totals, or else to download, combine, and sort several very large spreadsheet files. I left this experience confident that we have a general picture of what the stimulus is doing for the nation and our state, but not sure I could find results for a specific program or a specific school district. I also had lots of questions about definitions and how reliable the reports might be; there’s no effort to address these issues on the site.

STAR recently posted a blog entry summarizing what some of their members and related state organizations are finding as they dig through the data more carefully. Among the concerns are that some states seem to be under-reporting the jobs they’ve created, that most of the jobs saved are attributed to capital cities, and that there is no reporting on grant applications that are still in process. They (and I) may be asking for too much reporting and detail, but there’s already plenty being reported that is not all that informative, so it might be worth shifting gears for the next set of reports.

The stimulus promised untold and previously unforeseen transparency and accountability. So far, each new step brings more reports, but fails to fulfill the promise. The stimulus could, and in our view almost certainly is, making a difference in Oklahoma’s economy and investing in a brighter future. We just don’t know how exactly to find out yet.

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Recovery.gov, the federal government’s official ARRA site, features a map of reported contracts, spending, and jobs created or saved by state. Go a little further to this page, and you’ll find agency and state details. The only reports included so far are contracts made directly by federal agencies. This amounts to “only” $16 billion, or about 2 percent of the full stimulus. In Oklahoma, you’ll see that about $80 million is under contract but just $10 million has actually been received. The biggest projects are at Tinker Air Force Base, the Tar Creek cleanup, and some bridge and airport projects. 202 jobs have reportedly been saved or created. You can find more details in this Oklahoman article.

Not everybody is satisfied with the government’s portrayal of the reporting. The Coalition for Accountable Recovery, a consortium of nonprofit organizations, recently called for improving the web site:

Both the quality of the data and its awkward presentation preclude meaningful analysis by analysts, taxpayers, or the news media,” said OMB Watch executive director Gary D. Bass. “The data must improve if the Recovery Act is to meet President Obama’s pledge of true transparency.

There is definitely room for improvement and the phased reporting process will give the Recovery.gov team every opportunity to consider and respond to this well-founded criticism.

Whether or not it is presented more clearly, the next reporting, from state and local governments, will be more illuminating. These are the projects that make up a large share of the stimulus, were intended to stabilize the economy quickly, and can help make investments in and for the economic recovery. The White House previewed some numbers recently. It issued a report showing that ARRA education funding has made nearly all of the shortfall in state education spending. In Oklahoma and most other states, the stimulus has so far prevented teacher layoffs and tuition increases. A Tulsa World editorial on the early reporting suggests the jobs picture probably would have been worse without the stimulus.

If you’d like to learn more about the stimulus, you can look into the Oklahoma ARRA page at http://www.recovery.ok.gov. You’ll find a useful breakdown of the money coming to our state and a reasonably well-kept list of funding announcements and progress. The data page now provides estimates of spending and jobs created so far in our state, though details are limited. Perhaps the six-month reports and demands for more  transparency will make that site more useful. OK Policy also maintains a stimulus page, with useful links, a thorough issue brief on all the major provisions of the stimulus, and occasional updates on stimulus programs in specific policy areas.

Nobody stays awake long poring through government reports–believe me, we’ve tried. But the fact that we could try–that these reports are required, available to anyone, and pretty simple–is a huge step. Government transparency is an essential ingredient to government effectiveness. If citizens can tell how government is spending its money and what is being accomplished, they are more likely to appreciate the essential role that government plays in our economy and quality of life. We hope the greatest lasting effect of the stimulus will be a commitment at all levels of government to let the people paying the bills know what they are getting.

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