It seems old Dick Patten at the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) is up to his old tricks again, trying to scare people about the estate tax with lies and distortions in an attempt to gin up support to kill the tax in Congress. This time, though, he's adopted pious language to spread the gospel of the "evils" of the tax among religious conservatives.

In a recent article, Rebecca Foerg-Spittel over at Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, details the interesting press conference Patten headed up last week at the offices of the conservative Family Research Council (FRC). During the event, according to Foerg-Spittel, Patten "weaved a strange and tenuous web among business, church, and social structure" in an attempt to portray the estate tax as a tool government uses "to take things away from 'us' (Read: evangelical Christian family business owners) – property, spirituality, and a way of life."

After quoting scripture to portray one's inheritance as a "sacred right," the AFBI executive director really goes out on a limb:

According to Patten, the original Hebrew word for inheritance refers to both spiritual and physical inheritance. Thus, when the government takes away from one’s physical inheritance, it takes away from a sort of spiritual inheritance as well.

And to drive home the point to his FRC audience, Patten claimed – I'm not kidding – "Sixty percent of family businesses are owned by evangelical Christians." Foerg-Spittel did a little fact checking and, big shock, couldn't find any published data to support Patten's claim.

Foerg-Spittel also amply dissects the anti-estate tax argument in her piece:

The right claims both that the tax is a needless attempt to prey on one’s lifelong earnings, and that it is particularly severe on small business, but given that the estate tax only kicks in for inheritances over $3.5 million, the right's argument that this is a populist cause becomes more tenuous.

She's absolutely right, in fact, Citizens for Tax Justice released its latest report in December detailing the effects of the estate tax and concluded that only 0.7 percent – less than one percent – of estates faced any estate tax liability in 2008. Because estate tax exemption levels increased from $2 million in 2008 to $3.5 million in 2009, the percentage of estates facing tax liability in 2009 will be even lower.

Patten may believe that he can incite a Third Great Awakening with his calls to defeat the "evil" estate tax, but his arguments are so hackneyed and boilerplate that they don't get past even a mild amount of scrutiny. Of course, that's never stopped him before.

Image by Flickr user rossaroni used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, a group of organizations, including OMB Watch, submitted concerns with the high-value datasets published on Data.gov in compliance with the requirements of the Open Government Directive (OGD) issued on Dec. 8. The OGD required that agencies submit at least three high value datasets within 45 days through Data.gov.   These groups outlined the major problems with the site and its implementation thus far.  I have summarized these issues below.

Yesterday, a group of organizations, including OMB Watch, submitted concerns with the high-value datasets published on Data.gov in compliance with the requirements of the Open Government Directive (OGD) issued on Dec. 8. The OGD required that agencies submit at least three high value datasets within 45 days through Data.gov.   These groups outlined the major problems with the site and its implementation thus far.  I have summarized these issues below.

Format & Usability

A major concern of the community is that releasing data in specific formats may make it more usable to coders and the tech-savvy, but not to the general public writ large.  If data is solely released in formats such as XML or CSV leaving the majority of the public unable to decipher these raw formats then Data.gov’s attempt to make the government more transparent has failed.    What good is information if we can’t read it?

The solution?  We proposed that the administration strike a balance between releasing data in machine readable formats and presenting the data to the public through web-based interfaces.  Web-based interface can be designed in a user-friendly way that aggregates the raw data for quick and convenient access.

Definition of High Value

The OGD mandated that agencies release three “high-value” datasets on Data.gov.  However, the Sunlight Foundation noted that only 16 of the 58 datasets posted by major agencies were previously unavailable.  The vast majority of released datasets were already online but not in machine readable format.  This meant that the administration only picked the low-hanging fruit in its first data release.  On the other hand, the data was now available in a central location and in a better format.

Still, this leaves open the question of how the government is defining “high value.”  According to the Open Government Directive, high value data is information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation.  Yet, the agencies do not have to demonstrate how the releases they submit qualify under these categories.  To resolve this issue we expressed the need for such a requirement.  Other things we asked for:  notations that indicate which datasets are already available and unavailable as well as datasets that help hold agencies accountable for their policies and spending decisions.

Data Quality

This third issue mainly centers on the fact that some datasets could not be opened, were missing portions, or missing headers.  Missing headers, of course, means the data cannot be used even by coders.  Moreover, it was discovered that some of the datasets were being quietly removed from the site without public notification.

Here, we stressed the need for a better feedback mechanism than what exists on the site.  We made the point that there needs to be a system to report problems with specific datasets.  Further, we asked that all datasets on Data.gov be directly associated with their code sheets.
Ultimately, this is a great first step in showing the amount of data the agencies are capable of putting out in machine readable format.  Never before have we been able to access so much raw data in one place.  Despite the short deadline for this disclosure, several executive agencies released more than the required three datasets.  The implementation, however, needs to be improved through  creating public facing interfaces, requiring agencies to demonstrate the value of the data, and by providing a means of user feedback.

In order to improve Data.gov and the range of data included on the site, the administration is welcoming comments on its blog, Join the Dialogue. Additionally, Data.gov allows users to rate each dataset for ease of access, usefulness, data utility, and an overall ranking.

To read the group’s arguments and other points of contention in full, see the letter we sent here.  Feel free to give us your feedback.

In 2002, while working a polling site in Selma, Alabama, during a state senate race, I remember vividly how proud I felt to be participating in our democratic process. Being in the very city where the value of voting and the right to vote was literally beaten into the consciousness of the American people, had a profound and lasting impact on me.

 The right of citizens to vote is not to be taken lightly; it is an essential right and is the highest form of exercising civic responsibility. It is what we are supposed to do as citizens of this country, and being in Selma reinforced that view for me. In spite of or because of the many people that engaged in invaluable efforts – and sometimes paid with their lives – to ensure that all Americans could vote, it is our responsibility to participate in this process.

For much of the first decade of the 21st century, however, those lessons were lost as state governments and even the federal government actively sought to suppress the vote and disenfranchise millions of Americans. In late January, the situation for our democracy got even worse.

On Jan. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns as long as they don't formally "coordinate" with candidates or political parties. American politics is already dominated by money. The amount of money that will now be available will be astronomical and could easily drown out the voice of the average American voter. The potential to unbalance the scales and infringe on the right of all Americans to have their voices heard through the principle of "one person, one vote" presents a clear and present danger to our democracy.

Corporations and their allies may even outspend political parties in seeking to influence policy and the whole of the political discourse. The most recent example: according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the Republican National Committee and more than double the expenditures of the Democratic National Committee.

In 1971, Marvin Gaye wrote and released one of the most powerful albums ever made – What’s Going On. It was a simple question about the events of the time, and his expression about those events transcended time. Thus, I use it now. What's going on?

The Citizens United decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, removes limits on so-called "independent expenditures" that are not coordinated with candidates' campaigns. It leaves in place a ban on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions, but it allows for unlimited donations to flow to some nonprofit corporations – 501(c)(4)s, 527s, and PACs – to use to influence elections in a partisan manner. Justice Anthony Kennedy, using what some call "aggressive intervention" or "judicial activism," said that political speech is "indispensable to decision making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual." So now corporations are to be treated the same as individual American citizens? What's going on?

The five-justice majority also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that served to regulate union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns. Advocates of responsible government, campaign finance reform, and those organizations that promote civic engagement are rightfully concerned and dismayed that the ruling against the limits will be tantamount to selling our elections to the highest bidder. What's going on?

This Supreme Court ruling has the potential to drown out the voice of "We the People." A strong response to the Court's ruling is necessary and puts 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations in a critical position to ensure that their constituents’ needs and concerns aren't lost in a deluge of corporate dollars. Otherwise, I fear all we are left with is the question, "What's going on?"

In our statement on the president's FY 2011 budget request to Congress, we mentioned a column in Tuesday's WaPo by Len Burman in which he called for a freeze in tax expenditures. The column, however, deserves more attention than just the one liner we added in the OMB Watch statement.

Here's the paragraphs from which we drew our reference:

At the same time the president promised restraint on a sliver of the federal budget, he proposed new tax breaks for child care, retirement savings and small-business capital gains. This is a perverse kind of gift: Many of the goodies the political Santas leave under our trees will be paid for, with interest, by our kids.

But suppose Obama's "freeze" were also applied to tax expenditures. Say we postponed its effect until fiscal 2013 so that the effects do not threaten a nascent economic recovery. Capping tax expenditures at 2012 levels for three years and indexing the cap for inflation after that, as proposed for non-security discretionary spending, would reduce the deficit by about $3.5 trillion. That's right -- 14 times as much as what the president's spending freeze would save.

What is not commonly mentioned in budget discussions are the hundred of tax breaks for businesses and individuals designed to subsidize certain activities. These tax breaks cost the federal government over $1 trillion per year. Some object to calling these breaks "tax expenditures" because the money was never in the hands of the government so it could never spend it. It's an alluring philosophical argument, but totally blinkered economically and budgetarily. Not collecting $X in taxes form an oil company because it drills for oil in a certain location is the same thing as the government collecting $X dollars in taxes and then turning around and writing a check to that oil company because it drilled in a certain location.

Chapter 16 of the Analytical Perspectives of the President's Budget is a good place to begin looking at tax expenditures (click on Federal Receipts). It's quite a read.

The Joint Committee on Taxation also enumerates tax expenditures. See here.