Read the Bill ; Making Laws Should Be Open to the Public

Summary

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The Tea Party movement has its finger on the pulse of the next big thing: fiscal transparency. During this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, Tea Party Patriots and several other sponsoring organizations unveiled a new project: the Contract From America, which features a Web site with which users can vote on a number of suggested planks for the final contract, to be unveiled on tax day - April 15. Building on a trend that has emerged over the past few years, several of the suggestions place a strong emphasis on transparency in government.

Lawmakers and activists from around the country have made (and are making) great strides toward greater transparency in government spending in recent years. More than two dozen states have enacted legislation mandating the creation of searchable online databases detailing comprehensive information on government spending, and several governors have taken executive steps to create such Web sites. (The full list of state-spending-transparency Web sites is found at FiscalAccountability.org.)

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Read the Bill ; Making Laws Should Be Open to the Public

But while Americans are appreciative of their ability to better scrutinize government expenditures through such Web sites, policy developments in Washington last year have made abundantly clear that true fiscal acco...

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