Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved H.R. 5140, the grandly-named Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008 It's the $146 billion economic stimulus package worked out by House and administration negotiators last week.

Elections are the time when politicians pay the most attention to people and issues, and therefore the best time to ask them questions about how they plan to govern. OMB Watch wants your help in figuring out the best questions on government transparency that can be put to the candidates. Take just a few minutes to answer our survey and vote on your five favorite questions on the issue of government transparency and openness. We will then share the top questions with the news media and other organizations that have direct contact with candidates. Government openness affects every issue from budget and taxes, to the regulatory process, to non-profit advocacy. The range of questions tries to reflect this breadth so check them and see which are most important to you. Take the Open Government: What We Need To Know Survey today.

The Senate Finance Committee is considering new rules on Wednesday (Jan. 30) to increase transparency of the committee's meetings. While the proposed changes are a welcome step toward openness and transparency, the draft rules contain several serious problems. We need to give the committee quick feedback on these problems and get them fixed before Wednesday's markup. Most notable are the following three problems:

Writing on the Heritage Foundation's blog, The Foundry, rbluey calls me out for my bashing (here and here) of Brian Riedl's paper Tax Rebates Will Not Stimulate The Economy and recent statements he made in a BNA article($). The following is my response. Coming back to tenth-grade economics, in which we learn that "economic growth" refers to the change in the value of all goods and services (gross domestic product, or GDP) produced over a given time period in a given set of product and service markets, we can make any number of assertions that activity X will result in an increased value of such production. Riedl's paper relies on this definition economic growth ("By definition, an economy grows when it produces more goods and services than it did the year before."), but then claims that increased consumer expenditure, prompted by an increase in consumer income enabled by government transfers (i.e. tax rebates), do not, in fact cause the economy to produce more stuff in 2008 than it would have without such rebates. This is wrong (see e.g., CBO Director Peter Orszag, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, Harvard Economics professor and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and President Reagan's chief economic adviser Martin Feldstein, and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers).