I just discovered that California has created a follow-the-leader site called recovery.ca.gov to mimic the federal recovery.gov site.
Both sites, while boasting transparency, do as much to obfuscate and plain ol' brag as they do to reveal what's really going on.
When I visited the California site, I was struck first by how huge the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger is. I found it overpowering and tasteless, but that aside, what about the content of the site?
I went immediately to a link/PDF called "Funding for California in the First 30 Days." My breath was bated as I hoped to discover where and when the first wave of funding had been spent, but there was nothing like that in there. Instead, there was just a rundown of where the fed dollars will eventually go, along with a bunch of editorial comments that sometimes ring hollow.
Take this one entry about money for California's Community Health Centers. The explanation said that the $15.6 million allocated would go toward assiting 81,000 patients and creating 600 jobs. I quickly opened up the calculator on my desktop and divided $15.6M by 600 bodies and came up with the figure of $26,000, so either those jobs are mostly part-time and/or poorly paid, or there's a lot of hot air going on here.
Which one is it? Answer: Don't spend too much time on the site unless you have your AC unit cranked up.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi, I thought that it should be noted that the millions of dollars for community health centers are indeed for helping patients and creating jobs, but part of the deal is that the money is also to be spent on technology and equipment improvements. A lot of these health centers have not been able to update their equipment (which would help patients and staff) or expand to accommodate increasing numbers of patients. So, it's not really as simple as dividing all that money by 600, you know?
Great blog, by the way. I'll keep reading.
Post a Comment