Government 'Recovery' website leaves much to be desired, and imagined

It’s a small comfort that someone in the federal government decided to create a website to provide information about where all that stimulus aka recovery money will go. The site Recovery.gov loads quickly and has a user-friendly navigation bar. The site is attractively designed. And that’s the sum of the good stuff. Because the content on the site is sorely lacking in terms of explaining exactly how much funding is going where. What does the site tell us about where our taxpayer money will go?

This chart is the only real content on the government's official 'Recovery' website explaining where the stimulus/aka recovery money will go.

At present the figures show the following: $288 billion for tax relief; $144 billion for state and local fiscal relief; $111 billion for infrastructure and science; $59 billion for healthcare; $53 billion for education and training; $43 billion for energy; $8 billion for other. There’s also $81 billion designated for “protecting the vulnerable.”

I have to hand it to whoever parsed the chart showing those figures. He or she had a definite creative bent. Those scant sums by the way are the only real content on that site, other than a few “coming soon” announcements.

What, exactly, does “protecting the vulnerable” mean? Who decides who’s vulnerable? And who exactly is “other”?

Why didn’t those who prepared this website list, item by item, the requests for funding? And while we’re at it, why aren’t names of those who inserted line items placed beside those requests? A document more than 1,000 pages long has been condensed into politic-ese. The compaction of valid content on this site is sort of like gathering all the sand on a beach and scooping out a cupful, taking that cupful home and inviting neighbors to come over for a sunbathing session.

Washington has yet to realize Americans are not as stupid as we appear, although we continue to vote for political icons whose usefulness in public service has morphed into devotion to special interest groups and personal-professional fiefdoms.  The manner of creating and pushing this bill is the exact opposite of promised transparency. The bill itself is a product of a Democratic Congress gone amok. Many of us have little faith this stimulus/recovery money will solve the real problem with this economy.

We have built a government we cannot fund without foreign debt. Until we elect individuals who will begin to whittle away at the bloated federal bureaucracy, we will continue to see government intervention in a problem largely created by government.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan watchdog group, roundly criticized the bill. CAGW president Tom Schatz said, “President Obama’s promise of a transformative stimulus package is certainly coming true. This $900 billion will permanently increase the size of government and exacerbate the nation’s already unparalleled debt burden. Members of Congress have used this ‘Mother of All Emergency Spending Bills’ to lard on tens of billions of dollars for pet programs, many of which have dubious merit even in the normal appropriations process.”

Nothing in Washington has changed. The stimulus/recovery bill proves that. Transparency in the federal government is, like many other promises, a standard political pickup line. Real change comes only when politicians develop a sense of ethics. Those who actually have a sense of ethics are the minority in both parties at present.

Right now political titans have a sense of one thing—socialism. Your wealth, if you have any, will begin to be redistributed when the tax increase to pay for this bill occurs. The sparse content on the Recovery website is an insult to intelligence on any level.