Recovery.gov Launches
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Economic recovery, Money, Technology, Transparency
No more placeholders.
The site has finally launched and it has some good content, Including links to pretty much anything they have created about the bill and a place to share your story.
There’s also a map that details how many jobs in each state will be created or saved in the next 2 years. Missouri will apparently see 69,000 jobs created or saved, while California will see 396,000.
My guess is that you’ll start to see a lot more detail added to these numbers in the coming weeks as money starts heading out the doors. And given that this is the first time something like this has happened, I know Obama will probably see a popularity bump because of the transparency of the site.
Take a look and share your thoughts.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Economic recovery, Money, Technology, Transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
There’s also a map that details how many jobs in each state will be created or saved in the next 2 years.
And if you believe those figures, or even that it’s possible to make such a prediction within an entire order of magnitude, I have a watch to sell you. Also a bridge, and some lovely water-front property in Florida.
Seriously, it’s simply blue-sky BS. But it is nice to have the linkage to all 1,000-plus pages of the bill so we can red it, since Congress didn’t do so before passing it.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Tully,
What? You’ve never heard of Psychohistory? Seriously though, it’s a good idea that implies transparency.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I’m with Tully on this one…We’ve gone to job creation to job saving–how do you measure jobs saved? C’mon.
Depending on the moment, George Bush claimed he created 2.4 million, 4.8 million or I don’t even remember his other claims. And with some deft mathmatics he could justify his numbers but no one could ever figure out where those jobs were.
Same with Obama..the guy in the White House gets to TRY and shape the reality, but until we actually start seeing dropping unemployment and underemployment, it’s just words.
Call me skeptical….I’m am hopeful, but so far his recovery bill is anemic, his bank bill a joke, and his decision to follow W. on more than a few War on Terror issues has me greviously concerned.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:23 am
The only transparency is by implication, and the implication is itself a fraud. There is NO way to measure net “jobs saved or created” by the “stimulus” bill. It’s still nice to have some the info site up, just foolish to place any faith in the speculative claims made there.
No way at all to reliably measure “jobs saved,” and claiming that any post hoc increase in employment is due to policies and spending is still not honest, as reliably tracing the origins of incremental employment to specific policies is simply not feasible. It also requires ignoring the flip side of jobs not created in the first place by policies and resultant taxation.
Example: If there is an increase in 500K jobs over 12 months, the admin will claim credit–but it’s entirely possible the increase would have been twice as large without the policies/spending, so the true economic result of the policies/spending would be a 500K loss. More likely is continued erosion of employement extending several months past the “bottom” of the recession–and then the admin will claim they prevented it from being even worse and thus “saved” XXX jobs, likewise an economically unsupportable and econometrically unverifiable claim.
Of course, it’s not as if every other admin hasn’t made similar claims. The silly thing is that people believe them.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Don’t forget stimuluswatch.org