Listen to the People

I like the concept behind the Program for Public Consultation website and some of the response they have come up with regarding issues like the budget. Very democratic, very Wisdom of Crowds oriented. You think the PTB (Powers that Be) will listen?

explanation of Wisdom of Crowds from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fairly accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).

The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling, but there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book.

It seems like they were able to come up with some common sense answers to the budget question without the ancillary mess that the current process leaves behind. And one thing you have to say is, it fulfills the will of the people, because it is a composite of the will of the people.

I get the part that says we have a representative form of government. But it's pretty clear that over the last couple of decades, it is the representatives themselves who are a major part of the problem. The whole listening to the people who they represent thing.

Anyway, very interesting stuff.

Program for Public Consultation

Consulting the People on Public Policy

http://www.public-consultation.org/whatis.html

What is Public Consultation?

Public consultation is a means to improve democratic governance by helping governments consult their citizenry on the key public policy issues the government faces.

Public consultations are conducted with representative samples of the citizenry. Using standard scientific methods of random sampling, a sample is chosen and subsequently weighted to reflect the population census on all major demographic variables, thus producing an accurate microcosm of the citizenry.

Standard public opinion polls using representative samples can be an effective means of consulting citizens on issues for which they have already given significant thought.

The public consultation process has the potential to go beyond the limitations of standard public opinion polls and to widen the scope of possible areas on which the public can be meaningfully questioned. This requires giving respondents key information and presenting them a wide range of arguments on the issue. The goal is for respondents to have a deliberative experience that simulates that of a policymaker.

A key feature of the public consultation process is that it is, to the extent possible, developed in conjunction with policymakers, including those representing a range of views on the issue at hand. Policymakers, as well as advocates on different sides of the issue, are invited to propose and finally approve the information and arguments that are presented to respondents.

The most common form of the consultation process is through an in-depth survey in which respondents are presented key information and the opportunity to deliberate by evaluating the full range of arguments on an issue. Finally they are asked to express their views in response to a complex menu of policy options. Ideally such a process is conducted on-line so that the respondent can take all the time they need to read and re-read the presentation of information, arguments and policy options.

In some cases respondents engage in trade-off exercises in which they are required to make graduated choices among competing priorities, just as policymakers must do. For example, respondents may be asked to construct a budget by distributing revenues among numerous spending areas and considering the option of raising or lowering the level of various types of revenue.

For especially challenging or complex issues, it may also necessary for respondents to participate in citizen assemblies in which respondents meet in person for several hours to several days. In this context they have the opportunity to be briefed in depth, to ask questions of experts, and to deliberate in discussions with other respondents before finally coming to their conclusions.

Why Public Consultation is a Good Idea
Public consultation responds to Americans' demand for greater democratic responsiveness and can help restore Americans' confidence in government.

Polls show large majorities of the public are demanding that government be more responsive to the will of the people. This is prompted by their commitment to democratic principles. It is also prompted by the growing and now widespread perception that government leaders pay little attention to the voice of the people and prioritize serving special interests over the common good. This has led to disturbingly low levels of trust in government and undermined the public's readiness to make short term sacrifices for long term goals. Symptomatic are chronic budget deficits which reflect the public's resistance to paying taxes while still demanding services, prompted by the belief that a large portion of tax money serves special interests and not the interests of the citizenry.

Public consultation is a means to give the people a stronger and clearer voice in the policy process; it is likely to increase the influence of the public and to contribute to restoring confidence in the democratic process and the decisions of government.

It may be that the public has an exaggerated belief about the role of special interests and when given the chance may actually arrive at conclusions largely similar to the ones currently being made. On the other hand, it may be that they may arrive at significantly different policy decisions. In either case, having public consultation will give the public a greater voice and will create an opportunity for a real dialogue that can move beyond the current mistrust.

Public consultation can improve policymakers' understanding of the views of their constituents.

As mentioned, government officials have limited resources for gaining information about the attitudes of their constituents as a whole. Research shows that when government officials are asked to predict how the majority of their constituents will respond to a question, they are often quite mistaken. Research also shows that policymakers tend to underestimate the willingness of the public to accept the changes necessary to address key problems. Public consultation is a means to improve policymakers' understanding of the public and is likely to help free policymakers to be more proactive in addressing challenges.

Public consultation gives policymakers a way to test new ideas.

Right now the process by which new ideas emerge is relatively slow: they must first get attention from the media and only then do they gradually gain enough currency to be adapted into proposals for public policy and then finally to be considered by the citizenry. Public consultation gives policymakers the means to quickly and easily test new ideas for addressing current challenges, giving greater efficiency to the broader creative process by which policy develops.

Public consultation is likely to be a force for greater consensus.

The world of people who are actively involved in shaping public policy tends to be highly polarized, with individuals and groups taking strong positions and fighting hard to prevail. In the world of policy advocates and also among elected officials, on a left-to-right scale, there is a u-shaped curve with clusters on the right and left and few in the middle. Among the general public, though, mapped on the same scale, you find a normal curve, with many in the middle and fewer at the extremes. Members of the public are more likely to see some validity in both sides of the issue. Thus they tend to resist choosing one value over another and try harder to find policies that balance and integrate values. In focus groups consisting of representative samples of the public, people rarely argue and spontaneously try to find common ground. Thus public consultation with representative samples is likely to be a greater force for consensus than the existing policy community. Public consultation has the potential to mediate or between the polarized forces of the policy process.

Furthermore, public consultation can help discover the potential for consensus when it is not readily apparent. For example, when an on-line survey reveals a lack of consensus, this would be a key moment for conducting an in-person meeting in which people would have the opportunity to have discussions with people holding different viewpoints. These would be conducted by facilitators trained in proven methods for finding policy consensus.

Public consultation is a way to draw on the collective intelligence and even wisdom of the society as a whole.

Research has shown that the best approach to solving problems is to integrate the views of large numbers of people who are each likely to bring unique perspectives. The integration of these perspectives effectively pools knowledge and tends to produce conclusions that reflect a greater intelligence than is found in even the smartest individual in the group. Research has also shown that when policymaking communities, often consisting of highly intelligent and informed individuals, become unresponsive to outside perspectives they can become subject to 'groupthink' which can cause them to have major blind spots and to make decisions that, in retrospect, are seen as highly unfortunate. Public consultation is likely to constantly vitalize the policy discourse by giving expression to the full spectrum of views in the population and drawing on the intelligence of the society as a whole.

Public consultation can facilitate the emergence of constructive developments in society.

Contrary to widespread assumptions, the citizenry tends to be ahead of government in responding to emerging shifts in social norms and new collective priorities. For example, historically the majority of Americans was ahead of the government in supporting racial equality. Currently most Americans believe the government is not taking enough action on climate change, with large majorities supporting all the major legislation and treaties proposed over the last decade. It appears that the distribution of forces influencing the government is more committed to the status quo than is the distribution of attitudes in the public. Public consultation, by giving the public a greater voice, is likely to be a force to promote the emergence of new constructive developments.

http://www.public-consultation.org/studies/budgetcomparisons_mar11.html

Public Proposes Federal Budget Dramatically Different Than House or White House

March 3, 2011

Full report(PDF)

American Public Shows How it Would Cut the Budget Deficit

An innovative study has found that when a representative sample of the American public was presented the federal budget, they proposed changes far different from those the Obama administration or the Republican-led House have proposed.

The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases. However, the public also favored more spending on job training, education, and pollution control than did either the administration or the House. On average the public made a net reduction of $146 billion--far more than either the administration or the House called for.

While there were some partisan differences in the magnitude of spending changes, in two out of three cases average Republicans, Democrats and independents agreed on which items should be cut or increased.

The public also showed readiness to increase taxes by an average of $292 billion--again, far more than either the administration or the House.

"Clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House are out of step with the public's values and priorities in regard to the budget," comments Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), which conducted the study. PPC is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Unlike in conventional polls, PPC consults with the public by presenting respondents with information on policy issues and a range of options to address them. In this case respondents were presented the discretionary budget, with descriptions of each program, and allowed to make changes.

On average, the public cut defense spending by 18%, reducing it by $109 billion. By contrast, the president's proposal increases defense spending by 4% and the House calls for increasing it 2%. For intelligence agencies the public cut 15%, while the administration says the agencies would grow, though at a slower pace.

The most dramatic differences were for job training and higher education. The public increased job training a whopping 130%, while the House cut it by a stark 47%. The administration nicked it 3%. For higher education, the House cut it 26%, the administration increased it 9% and the public increased it 92%.

Energy and the environment were also major areas of difference. The House bill cuts the Department of Energy's work on renewables and efficiency by 36%, while the administration increases it 44%. The public went even further, increasing it 110%. While the House cuts the EPA's budget by 39% and the administration cuts it by 13%, the public increased spending on pollution control by 17%.

The public cut the space program 17%, while neither the administration nor the House made significant changes. The administration made modest increases to science, as did the public (5%), but the House cut it by 12%.

The public cut spending for foreign aid that is meant to serve strategic purposes. Aid to countries "of strategic concern"--known as the Economic Support Fund--was cut a substantial 23% while military aid was cut 15%. The administration cut the Economic Support Fund 9% while the House cut it 6%, but neither made significant cuts to military aid.

For more altruistic forms of aid, on balance the public made little change--increasing humanitarian aid by 18%, cutting development assistance 14% and leaving spending on global health essentially unchanged. In the president's 2012 proposal, humanitarian assistance funding is cut 8%, while funding for global health gets an increase (11%) and so does development assistance (12%). In the House bill, humanitarian assistance is cut 17%, global health by 6% and development assistance by 18%.

The administration is calling for large scale increases to federal spending in highways (53%), air travel and roads (36%), and mass transit (109%). The House made a deep cut (27%) to mass transit. The public, meanwhile, makes modest cuts to highways (9%) and air travel and roads (7%), but leaves mass transit essentially unchanged.

For this analysis the changes the public made in the budget exercise were compared to the OMB projected budget for 2015, while those the administration made were in its 2012 budget proposal relative to the previous year. Changes by the House were based on the recently-passed changes to spending for 2011. (2011 spending is lower than 2015 projections but the distributions are very similar; thus comparisons of percentage changes are meaningful.)

Besides making changes to spending, respondents were presented a series of options for increasing revenue. On average respondents increased revenues by $292 billion. The largest portion was from income taxes: majorities increased taxes on incomes over $100,000 by 5% or more and increased them by 10% or more for incomes over $500,000. Majorities also increased corporate taxes and other excise taxes.

For the estate tax, a majority (77%) favored reverting at least to the 2009 levels, taxing estates over $3.5 million at a 45% rate. Only 15% of respondents supported the estate tax levels recently passed: taxing estates over $5 million at a 35% rate.

The Obama administration holds to its position that the Bush-era tax cuts for incomes above $250,000 should be allowed to expire, and now proposes this for after 2012. By 2015 this would generate $97.2 billion in revenues. The House leadership has so far not made any proposal to increase tax revenues and has favored making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

The public study was fielded December 18-29 with a sample of 793 respondents (margin of error plus or minus 3.5%). It was conducted using the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. Initially, participants are chosen scientifically by a random selection of telephone numbers and residential addresses. Persons in selected households are then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®. For those who agree to participate, but do not already have Internet access, Knowledge Networks provides a laptop and ISP connection. More technical information is available at http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp/reviewer-info.html.

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Weep, you wealthy, for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches dissipate, and your garments become rage; your gold and silver are false, and their corrosion shall be a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. You pursued earthly wealth with the last days of your lives. The wages of laborers, which have been fraudulently taken by you, cry out, and these cries of injustice have been heard by the Lord." - James 5:1-5

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"Buying physical silver is by far the greatest act of wisdom and rebellion any American can and should be doing right now. It is both a Silver Bullet to rebel against the Elite’s corrupt system and a Silver Shield to protect your family and wealth in a post- dollar world. Buying physical silver is non-violent, non-compliant resistance. Most importantly it works outside of the system and it cannot be stopped."

http://dont-tread-on.me/the-silver-bullet-and-the-silver-shield

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up until the last 200 years, the Gold/Silver ratio was 16:1

- 323 B.C. the ratio was 12.5:1 upon the death of Alexander the Great
- During the Roman Empire the ratio was set at 12:1
- 12th to 17th Century the ratio was around 12:1
- end of the 19th century, the universal,fixed ratio of 15:1 ended
- end of the 19th century, the bi-metallism era ended, England demonetized silver
- 1980 the last great surge in gold and silver, the ratio stood at 17:1
- 1991 silver hit its low, the ratio peaks at 100:1
- 2003 to 2007 bull market in silver drops ratio to 45:1 from 80:1
- 2008 end of the Great Recession, the ratio rises back to 80:1

Historical Recent
Low 12:1 80:1
High 100:1 45:1