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This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 27th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Just the mere act of putting a local government checkbook online can put government officials

on notice that their activities are being monitored by the communities

they serve. Patrick Ishmael is director of government accountability at the Show Me Institute

in Missouri. We spoke about government transparency at the local level in October in Colorado Springs.

We have a rough time getting a handle on what the federal government spends. That's not totally clear at various points.

And for states, I suspect it's a little worse

and there are fewer people interested in it. So with respect to

local governments that would rather keep a lot of their activities at least

especially as a regard spending, Why should they be transparent?

Well, I mean, I think they should be transparent like any government should be transparent.

If you have the power to take money from people through force, it's not like they're earning this money. There is a higher standard

that has to be applied to you. And, you know, as a state-based think tank, the Show Me Institute typically focuses on statewide issues, but what we found as we were going through, you know, looking at how transparent was the state, we also realized that there was a lot of spending that also takes place with local governments.

And when you look at the actual data, the state of Missouri spends about $30 billion a year,

and local government spends about 30 billion dollars a year.

...