Recovery.gov

David L. Prychitko

Take a good look at Recovery.gov.

This 18 million dollar cite offers a goldmine of claims for those interested in rent seeking, questionable statistics, unclear sources of information, and best of all it's wrapped in an emphasis on the seen while failing to acknowledge the unseen.

Comments

[Contemplationist]

Gotta admit though, the design is fabulous. Is Government IT (at least the public facing side) getting so much better?

[Mario Rizzo]

Do they tell you the method used to estimate the jobs created or saved beyond saying "as reported by recipients"? One thing I wonder about is whether the report given affects the chances of further money? Is the money given in stages? Other interesting questions involve the contrary-to-fact hypothetical the reporters use to imagine what would have happened without the money. Are they saying, for example, we could not have hired these people at this particular wage rate without the money? Or we could not have hired them at all? Are they saying that since they could not have hired ALL of them at a particular wage rate that the employment is totally due to the stimulus money?

I know I am being a pest for details. But I am not the one who put up the site making claims about 600,000 plus jobs saved or created.

[Josh]

You just ruined my day.

[Dave Prychitko]

"Are they saying that since they could not have hired ALL of them at a particular wage rate that the employment is totally due to the stimulus money?"

Mario, I believe this is their claim.

[Greg Ransom]

Sort of like another IPCC ...

"a goldmine of claims for those interested in rent seeking, questionable statistics, unclear sources of information"

[John]

I think it provides enough data so that you can breakdown stimulus funds by congressional district (or maybe zip code). Combine that with some zip code unemployment data and you could get a pretty nice panel to test things like whether party affiliation of the area determined how much stimulus funds they received, or how senior the senator/representatives were in the area and how much stimulus the area received.

[Jeremy H.]

On the main Recovery.gov page, the table "Top States by Jobs Created/Saved" is my favorite: 110,185.36 jobs saved/created in California. Such precision, down to the hundredth place!

[doug]

Serve.gov is far more heart-warming!