New Math 2.0
By Amit Singh | Friday, November 27th, 2009 | PolicyIn a world of supercomputers and sophisticated programming languages, one would think keeping track of stimulus money going to 435 Congressional districts would be a job for a computer science intern. But for just $18M, the shiny new website, Recovery.gov, which was created to promote government transparency and accountability showed millions of dollars going to non-existent Congressional districts. This error was not caught by the army of bureaucrats working on Capitol Hill or at the website itself but rather by staffers at ABCNews.
The site also proudly states that 640,329 jobs were created or saved as of Oct 30, 2009. Are we really supposed to accept those numbers when the US is at a 26 year high unemployment of 10.2%? Using the government’s own numbers, we are spending over $72,000 per stimulus job. Is it possible that reducing the corporate tax burden would have created more jobs? How many jobs are lost because America is less able to compete on the global market? How many jobs will be lost due to tax increases?
Vice President Joe Biden appeared on the Daily Show last week and chalked up the errors on Recovery.gov to human error. I agree.
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3 Responses to "New Math 2.0"
New Math? Nah, it’s the same math the government always uses when it comes to taxpayer money. Nothing ever goes down, only up. Heck, the formula was so good even real estate and Wall Street used it. And scientists gave up actually doing research for their grant money, preferring to rely on New Math computer models or the preconceived wishes of their benefactors. Who could have known the key to future prosperity and scientific advancement was merely removing the symbol – from any mathematical result.
See, that’s the whole problem with Republicans. You guys are too negative.
lol. pretty funny Darrell. I’ll have to use that one in the future
It’s worse. If the “stimulus” money went to your state, that state can claim they didn’t lay off a number of workers that they otherwise may have. They may not have, but padding the numbers by saying they would have makes it look like jobs were saved.
Notice the creative use of words. It was supposed to be “jobs created.” But that makes the numbers look pitiful, so they changed to “jobs created or saved.” That way, if you still have a job, Obama saved your job. Presto! Obama gets credit for making sure nothing happened.
It’s the first time the definition of “stimulus” was “nothing happened.”
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