Question of the day

How do we know stimulus is working?

Because we’ve got the signs to prove it.

You start putting up enough of these babies alongside the highways of America, you just might start distracting people from the fact that for Brazil, India, China, much of continental Europe and even that basket case, Japan, the recession has ended.

Us? Thanks, no – we’re rather enjoying our economy that shrank by 1 percent in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, we we’re checking out some stimulus projects here in San Diego County on Onvia’s excellent site here and two trends emerged. First, knowing this is a navy town, it would come as no surprise that many of the stimulus projects would be going to Navy and Marine Corps installations but we were a little taken aback that it is virtually all the stimulus projects slated for San Diego County going to such items as installing photovoltaic cells on the rooftops of various Navy/Marine Corps-occupied buildings.

And this begs the question, how many of these projects were funded already out of NAVFAC’s (people responsible for maintenance and upkeep of DON facilities) budget? We would imagine, quite a few of them. If anyone has any insight to this, do share.

Secondly, check out the delta between the CBO’s and the White House’s estimate for the number of jobs that will be funded by each project. In virtually every case, the CBO estimates about 50-60% of the White House’s far more optimistic prognostication.

But let's not linger upon these finer details for too long when we've got more signs to build.

Follow the money... if you can

Shortly after the economic stimulus bill was signed, Vice President Biden was talking up the administration's Web site to track the spending, Recovery.gov, when he accidentally directed people to Recovery.org.

As slip-ups go, this one had an upside: Unlike the government site, the privately run Recovery.org is actually providing detailed information about how the $787 billion in stimulus money is being spent.

We covered the bang-up job referenced private firm, Onvia, is doing in tracking the stimulus money, completely free of charge at their website Recovery.org, here.

And what do you think the person in charge of the federal government’s website thinks of all this? Here’s Earl Devaney, the Interior Department inspector general who is in charge of stimulus oversight and who claims there is only so much spending underway that can be tracked on Recovery.gov:

"I'm not being particularly apologetic about where this site is today," he said. "I would be if someone could show me anything that has happened that isn't on this site."

Much like Onvia, we here at BwD provide a public service completely free of charge regarding divining the intent and meaning of government bureaucrat-speak and with respect to Mister Devaney’s quote above…. Translation: "Kiss my ass"…


P.S. Just think of how much more spending wouldn't/couldn't be tracked if they had actually dispersed more than 37% of the available funds to date.

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.