Montana should join the growing number of states offering complete transparency by posting their complete budgets on the Internet in plain English so taxpayers can search all government spending, by program, speakers told a forum Tuesday.

Local governments and school districts should follow suit, they said. That way, taxpayers who want to find out how much government agencies spent on a ream of paper, new office furniture or to mow the grass can do so easily. People could easily look up what a particular government employee or teacher is paid, speakers said.

"In the next 10 years, I believe all government will be transparent in the United States," Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told the Montana Legislators' Government Accountability Forum.

The forum sponsored by Montana Policy Institute of Bozeman, which formed in January, featured speakers from a number of other right-of-center groups besides Norquist's. They included the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, American Legislative Exchange Council, Center for Fiscal Accountability and PERC. Seventy people attended, with about half of them current or future Republican legislators.

Norquist said this transparency effort will succeed because it is nonpartisan. Liberals support it because they believe that once people study government spending, they will want to pay higher taxes.

"I'm willing to take that risk," Norquist said, confident that will not happen.

In addition, Norquist said the press loves Internet budget transparency. A "lazy" reporter can win a Pulitzer Prize just by checking out some government spending online, he said.

Sandra Fabry, executive director of the Center for Fiscal Accountability, part of Americans for Tax Reform, said spending transparency "will help make your case for 'Just say no.' "

In 2006, she said the most conservative U.S. senator, Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and the most liberal senator (and now-president elect), Barack Obama, D-Ill., sponsored a bill that passed unanimously to create a searchable database online for federal spending. It's at http://www.usaspending.gov/.

Since then, Fabry said the groups have pushed for state and local governments to enact similar laws.

Twelve states, including Utah and Washington, have passed transparency legislation the past two years, while governors in seven other states, including South Dakota, have issued executive orders to do so.

"Government spending should not happen in the dark," she said.

Advocates of budget transparency face resistance from some government bureaucracies that contend it can't be done, Fabry said, even though the federal Office of Management and Budget did so with the federal budget. Others say it will be costly, although she said it can be done for cheaper than anticipated.

Carl Graham, president of the Montana Policy Institute, said the transparency software is free and a project can be done for tens of thousands, not millions, of dollars. The federal project cost $700,000, he said.

Some skeptics say no one will bother looking at the budgets online, but Fabry said Missouri's budget site has had 13 million Web hits since going on the Internet in July 2007.

State Sen. Roy Brown, R-Billings, who campaigned for such transparency in his recent unsuccessful campaign for governor, said he will introduce a bill next year for a Montana project. Sen. Joe Balyeat, R-Bozeman, unaware of Brown's plan, also has requested such a bill and said they could work together on the effort.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer's budget director, David Ewer, who was not at the forum, said later he believes Montana already has a very transparent government, with information for the major budget bill available online.

"They can bring the idea to the Legislature," he said. "I have no idea what the information systems technology would cost to meet their desires. That's why we have a Legislature. I guess their timing shows the Legislature will get to hear from the public whether it is satisfied with the level of openness in their government."

Barry Paulson, a University of Colorado economics professor speaking for Americans for Prosperity, said Montana suffers from "unconstrained growth of spending."

He recommended that Montana adopt, by constitutional amendment, a tax and spending limitation measure applying to all spending and put any tax increase up to a public vote. He and others called for Montana to cut in half its individual and corporate tax rates to stimulate the economy.