Political Sunshine

Our Goals

Political Sunshine has a simple purpose: to provide you with the simple statistics that you need to be an informed citizen and voter.

Simply put, we are trying to bring some transparency to important activities of government and the economy to make it more difficult for demagogues to distort the facts.

We won't have everything right away but over time we will be adding more just as fast as we can find the data and organize it into something useful for you.

Hopefully, you will come to depend on us for understanding government statistics and surveys, and other private statistics, surveys and polls.

Announcements

5/27/08 - US Employment Statistics - You will find charts of ten years of quarterly changes in employment from 1998 through the first quarter of 2008. So far we have put up charts on 14 major non-farm employment sectors tracked by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Check back often for more data. These data will help you keep the current economic news in perspective.

4/15/2008 - New Comments from Health Business Blog - David Williams of Health Business Blog and MedPharma Partners reviewed our analysis of the uninsured this morning. Thank you.

4/10/2008 - Maryland Budget - I have noticed an increase in traffic interested in the Maryland FY09 budget. I will be updating the site over the next couple of weeks with the final budget. Over the coming months I will be providing departmental level analysis of major and high profile departments. If you have a particular question, need or comment, please don't hesitate to contact me. I will make every effort to help. Thank you.

3/27/2008 - New Publication - Model analyzing the components of people without health insurance. In our earlier data sets (under Health Care on the right), we claimed that the number of people who wanted but could not get health insurance is far less than the "47 million" often quoted in the media. This model presents our detailed analysis. It is based on lots of plausible assumptions and is still a work in progress. We would appreciate hearing from our readers about the reasonableness of our assumptions.

3/19/08 - New Data Set - State of Maryland 2008 and FY2009 Revenue estimates are now available.

The Maryland Bureau of Revenue Estimates is predicting that Maryland general revenues will INCREASE by almost $1 billion ($927 million) for FY09 vs. FY08. This is taking into account disappointing sales tax revenues for January and February. This is what you learn from looking at the numbers instead of reading the newspapers.

Be sure to check out our analysis and sources.

Don't forget to look at the Tax Collection numbers for January and February reflecting activity in December and January. Of particular interest will be the Sales Tax collections indicating declines in retail sales for both periods.

2/20/08 - New Data Set - State of Maryland FY 2007 Financial data is now up. Data for the proposed FY 2009 Budget is now up too. We are continuing to review these pages and plan to add substantial additional data in the coming days and weeks.

2/2/08 - New Data Set - The Current Population Survey numbers on people without health insurance are now available. These number are quite different from the CDC's National Health Interview Survey. Neither survey which both report over 40 million people without health insurance reflects the true number of people who do not have and cannot get health insurance nor do they so claim. See our comments on why this number is probably half the 40 million or even smaller.

2/2/08 - New Data Set - Statistics on income taxes paid by income brackets with comparisons to GDP are now available in the Income and Taxes section. Learn who pays taxes and what percent of their income they pay.

Organization of the Website

Each data set has four important tabbed sections:

Data Table - A table with not to much data that addresses an important issue.

Our Comments - We give our interpretation of the data and if required comment on the quality of the data and any issues with it.

References - We provide references to the data sources.

Your Comments - We respond to issues raised by your comments and criticisms. We encourage you to contact us, especially those of you who have created this data so that we can refine our interpretations and correct any errors.

Remember this is not a blog so we don't plan to have a running dialog with you. We'd rather spend our time creating clear interpretable data that you can use.