Transparency Revisited

In my previous post about transparency I had done a copy and paste of a table from recovery.gov. Out of curiosity I went back to the site and the offending material had been sanitized to only have the real districts and the rest of the money was listed as "Unassigned Congressional District". The totals all add up to the same amounts, but the figures look a whole lot less suspect. I figured that would happen, hence the copy and paste of the table. But the part that really gets me is that the page makes the claim of being updated 10/30/2009. For some reason I don't believe that. Maybe it was because my post commenting on it is dated 11/17/2009. The New Transparency indeed. And it isn't even like they got away with it. It got some serious press. The news stories can be cross referenced to see that the stories came out after the "update". Fictitious dates on updates after an uproar don't make for good government transparency.

Next post will not be about politics. I swear.

I Can Count Too

Yet another example of journalism that misses the point, a recent headline makes a big deal out of the number of pages in the health care bill. http://www.politico.com/livepulse/1109/Senate_bill_weighs_in_at_2074_pages.html?showall Sure, any bill that weighs in around the 2000 page mark is really long, but focusing only on page count doesn't really tell me anything.  The Senate version is longer than the House version, but both are around the 2000 page mark. That makes sense.  They are both more or less the same bill.  Some of the details will change from one version to the other, but they are both after the same general thing. Saying the Senate version is longer than the House version really tells us nothing.  It is no comparison. Try comparing it to other large pieces of legislation. I don't know, maybe something like the Patriot Act? It was a big controversial bill. I don't know if it was something that Senators and Representatives didn't read when they voted on it, but maybe a comparison to other bills would actually make the 2000 page statement mean something. If by some incredible twist of fate this is read by "the press", stop making meaningless shocking statements.  I can know almost all the story has to offer just by reading the headline. "Oooooooh, it's over 2000 pages." You grabbed my attention, now do something with it, and don't waste my time.

Where's My Time Machine?

Wait a minute. Too much spending is bad for the economy? After tacking on who knows how much spending in stimulus money and what health care might cost, we get this amazing foresight? http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN188108620091118

I just don't know what to say. I just wish I could go back in time and get him to realize this in January.

The New Transparency

I just started seeing the story on a friend's Facebook status about 30 jobs being created in Arizona's 15th Congressional District. The jobs only cost $25,380.67 each. The story then goes to say that there is no15th Congressional District in Arizona. There are only 8. I then decided to go look for the source of the story to see if I could see any obvious bias. Since there was no link on Facebook, I dusted off my Google Fu skills and found a number of news pieces about it. I also
found a link to recovery.gov. Below is a copy of the table found here: http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllCD&statecode=AZ

Top Congressional Districts	Jobs	Amount
4th congressional district	10,034.8	$1,772,338,156
7th congressional district	735.3	$394,080,874
1st congressional district	909.4	$217,071,244
5th congressional district	137	$145,399,210
6th congressional district	81	$89,641,748
2nd congressional district	135.3	$86,400,240
8th congressional district	106.2	$50,624,970
3rd congressional district	86	$42,422,493
86th congressional district	0	$34,412,126
40th congressional district	0	$1,280,838
9th congressional district	2	$905,475
15th congressional district	30	$761,420
00 congressional district	8	$599,061
78th congressional district	0	$490,482
38th congressional district	5	$391,139
11th congressional district	5	$288,020
29th congressional district	0	$148,482
36th congressional district	0	$81,071
50th congressional district	0	$70,000
52nd congressional district	7	$59,414
25th congressional district	0	$57,194
18th congressional district	1	$32,878

Sure enough there it is. $761,420 spent to create 30 jobs in a place that doesn't exist. That got me to thinking. After a quick glance I noted that there were more than 9 entries on the table. More than just the 15th Congressional District got the funding and jobs. There were some that got money, but created no jobs. $34,412,126 is a lot to spend on zero jobs, and it is in the 86th District. I might not have immediately thought there is no 15th District, but 86? I know for sure
there are not 86 Districts in Arizona. They haven't had that big of a population boom since I left the state. The other thing that I really didn't like was the discrepancy in dollars spent between the real Districts. Why did the 4th get 1.7 Billion Dollars in stimulus money while the others got significantly less. It received 62.5% of total stimulus money to the state. Theoretically the Congressional Districts should be more or less the same as far as population goes. With 8 real districts each one should get around 12.5% of the total for the state. The 7th (in second place) is the only one close to that. I know this is oversimplifying the whole thing, but in my humble opinion that is the way it should be. Predictably enough when I looked up the 4th District, I found this little tidbit about it being "the most friendly territory for Democrats in the state"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona%27s_4th_congressional_district#Competitiveness). Transparency and Change were a big buzz word during the campaign. It looks like the whole bipartisan divide isn't changing, but now it is more clearly seen. Now I am just trying to figure out if this is some sort of gross data entry error, a gross accounting error, or an example
of how some sort of shady back-room deal gets put on the books.