In 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.
