Thursday, May 14, 2009

You'd have better luck checking between the seat cushions of your sofa

So, where do you go when you want to find out where the federal stimulus money is going? Well, you sure as hell don’t go to recovery.gov, the official website of the stimulus plan which just offers broad brush strokes and splashy graphics but zero in the way of information on specific projects like the John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport (pop. 20 passengers a day).

Since there is no parent-child relationship between the federal, state and local governments and no hard and fast reporting requirements for who, where and how much with respect to the spending of stimulus dollars, the promised goal transparency is being met with the predictable results.

And since recovery.gov won’t have any details on the whereabouts of your stimulus tax dollars until October, who ya gonna turn to? Enter: the private sector.

An outfit called Onvia has a website of the their own named (cheekily?) recovery.org that, to date, has logged 10,000 specific contracts worth $40 billion and it’s provided completely free of charge.

Check out the Reason.tv video below with Onvia CEO, Mike Pickett talking about his website and accountability and transparency.

If embed no worky, please click here.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm confident that the coming higher interest rates and subsequent inflation will reduce the deficet just like in the 70s

Anonymous said...

Off-topic...

The term "socialist" is throw around way too loosely by people -- well -- by people on here (and many, many other places) to describe just about anything not on the neo-con agenda.

So, for good or bad, an article that is on something that is actually socialist...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14frugal.html?em

- Mongo Just Reading the Top 10 Most Viewed in the NYT and Passing It Along...

Dean said...

Mongo,
You obviously haven't been paying attention as I've made minimal use of the term with respect to Obama's policies. But I'm sure you were aware of that and just wanted to make a counterpoint.

Anon, I can only hope you were being facetious with that comment?

Dean said...

And term "neo-con" that is thrown around way too loosely by people -- well -- you in an out-of-context economic sense was irony that was not lost on you, I'm sure.

Well played, sir.