I support transparency in government spending, especially financial information in a standardized format. However, I don't share your optimism regular people wi

I support transparency in government spending, especially financial information in a standardized format. However, I don't share your optimism regular people will be able to make sense of this data. Just take the financials for public companies for example. Because all public companies report their financials in GAAP formats you'd think that therefore it would be easy to look at a company's balance sheet and cash flow statement to figure out what's really going on, right? Except it isn't. Despite standardized accounting rules and a standardized reporting format it's still very difficult to tell what's really going on behind the numbers. With the stock market there is a huge incentive for analysts to figure out what the numbers represent, for obvious reasons. And yet, more often than not, analysts get it totally wrong. There won't be similar army of analysts for public spending disclosures, just a couple of dedicated individuals, think tanks, and PhD students. I still support full financial transparency for the public sector, but I don't think it will have a huge impact because numbers by themselves say very little.