Science over at The Enterprise

I have a post this moring over at The Enterprise blog of The American this morning on why the stimulus bill will not produce path-breaking science.

Private Sector Competes on Recovery

Sometimes the best discoverys are mistakes. This one's getting added to that group.

Hoping to pick-up on traffic headed for recovery.gov, the government run clearinghouse for everything about the recent stimulus bill, the business-government partnership facilitation firm picked up a nice piece of web real estate: recovery.com


The firm lists information about specific projects funded by the stimulus bill and offers to connect firms that will try to access those funds with the proper government agencies. The stimulus bill was designed to create counter-cyclical spending but no doubt spending used to lobby/bid for government funding will be lambasted as wasteful, even though they create jobs. So despite comments that "jobs are jobs" we really do care where they are created.

The site is also putting out some easy to follow figures for tax payers. The chart below compares the stimulus spending to the overall spending typically given to each state.

Source: Recovery.com

The small size of the stimulus funding relative to the state's regular appropriations gives some credibility to Paul Krugman's argument that its just too small. Although, the stimulus money is in addition to, not a substitute for, all that regular funding.

I take the spending as a case that it may do more rather than not enough good. If the stimulus gave out huge funds to programs like unemployment insurance states could face problems readjusting to pre-stimulus levels.