Stephen's Personal Blog

It looks like the stimulus bill will pass today. The latest numbers I see are $787B to make 3.5M jobs. This is actually a bullshit number, because many incentives are tax breaks and if no one claims them or more than the expected number claim them the final tally won’t be $787B. Job numbers are based off of estimates, which seems like a good bit of tea leaf reading. They could give Boeing an tax incentive, which it claims, and then Boeing still lays off 50,000 works. Boeing is an example, but IBM actually did this. Let’s assume no one is lying and everyone involved is of the highest moral and ethical standards; incarnations of Buddha, Jesus, and Krishna. We will spend $225,000 per job “saved”. This is galling. I work in a educated field requiring a technical 4 yr degree and I have 10 yr experience. Even with benefits, my employer doesn’t spend anywhere near this number on me.

The Internet was stirred up by Obama’s election. Weeks before the stimulus bill is passed a website was created to track it’s expenditures and returns. If you would like to participate and note the use of funds in your own community go to:

Shovel Ready
ShovelWatch is a joint project of the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica, the morning news program The Takeaway and WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station.

One note: This is only a first step. We’ll be building and improving the site quickly.

And

Stimulus Watch
StimulusWatch.org was built to help the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend. We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects. These projects are not part of the stimulus bill. They are candidates for funding by federal grant programs once the bill passes. Learn more by reading the FAQs.

How can you contribute? Find a project that interests you, or about which you have special knowledge, and let us know what you think. You can find projects by searching or by browsing by locality or program type. Once you find a program, there are three things you can do: 1) vote on whether you believe the project is critical or not; 2) edit the project’s description and points in favor or against, and 3) post a comment in the conversation about the project.