If you live in California, you know what it's like to listen to the local radio stations tell you how the State Assembly and the Governor are going back and forth and back and forth on budget negotiations. Then Arnold and Karen Bass will come out and say that they're just days away from a deal...
But where's the spreadsheet?
I am interested in the ability of local online communities in partnership with local media to sustain a high quality discussion about political and economic events of primary interest to them. Participatory democracy at the local level needs to take place on line in partnership with radio leveraging synergy. I love listening to guys like John & Ken here in Los Angeles, but I want to check the facts myself. It's good to get caught in the emotion of politics, but in the end you need to analyze things for yourself. That can happen real quick when you seen budget numbers and who promises what. Consider the following:
(OK Don't) - I don't have a spreadsheet insert thingy here and I should be the expert but putting one in isn't worth doing to sustain the point. The point is simply that right now you have to imagine budget line items in the rows and partisan constituencies in the columns. And at in every moment of public budget negotiations until the end, all of the columns are multiple until they are negotiated down to one.
The problem is, of course, that we don't get to see the starting positions and how far in which direction they go as the negotiations progress. We're stuck with the bottom line.
I'd like to change that. Wouldn't you?
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