Thinking in Public
I have a dream: every dollar a government spends is public knowledge. That solves everything.
A live line for every contract, every salary, every transfer: searchable by name, department, amount and date, updated as it happens, so anyone can see exactly what a tax dollar built. No party owns this one. Every government spends money, and every citizen paying into it deserves to watch where it lands.
It's partly built already. Canada runs Open Government, the US runs USAspending.gov. Both are real. Neither goes far enough. Most of what's published still lands as a static report on a schedule, years behind a live search.
The US passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act in 2006, and USAspending.gov launched on December 13, 2007 as a database of federal spending. Canada's proactive disclosure covers contracts over $10,000, grants and contributions, and travel and hospitality spending.
Ukraine shows what a live search can do. Its open source procurement system, Prozorro, put contract data online. The Open Contracting Partnership reports savings of over US$6 billion as of December 2020, and the medical procurement agency cut medicine prices by up to 40%.
Pick one contract from your city, province or state. Find who got it, for how much and when. If you can find it in under five minutes, the system works. If you cannot, you have found the page that needs fixing.
Finish the job. Every dollar, every project, one search bar.