Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove

On Tuesday, Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO, plans to make public a database he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling called USAFacts, perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments, to "figure out what the govt really does with the money."

Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what % of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression & how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.

Mr. Ballmer calls it “the equivalent of a 10-K for government,” referring to the kind of annual filing that companies make.