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Stimulus Watch
Division of Labour — ... February 02, 2009 Stimulus Watch Sorry, Bob. It's not a Cinemax title. Launched officially today, it's the cool new wiki that lets you search, evaluate, and "vote" for individual line items proposed for the the stimulus package. Brought to you by our friends ...

Assorted links
Marginal Revolution — 1. David Levy reviews Bryan Caplan. 2. StimulusWatch.org 3. The very wise Alice Rivlin. 4. Is one hundred cents worth more than a dollar? 5. Culinary protectionism in Italy.

Transparency, Accountability, and the Debt Bomb
Cato @ Liberty — The NPR article containing the interview with House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey (D-WI) that my colleague Michael Cannon blogged on earlier today ends with statements by former Government Accountability Office (GAO) head David Walker that are worth highlighting: As it stands now, says David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general, the bill appears to have no mechanism for directing spending. It’s left up to those state and local officials, who may or may not have the ideas or the means to spend it appropriately. And that will lead to “a series of ...

Obama Truth Check
Cato @ Liberty — President Obama may have preempted the first hour of prime time Monday night, but he certainly did not fail to entertain with several pronouncements that require suspension of disbelief. Here are four Obama statements that deserve closer scrutiny: 1.      “[I]f you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of. We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough…” The fact is that numerous presidents, including ...

Stimulus Randomosity
The Learning Curve by Muckdog — Looks like the House and Senate have agreed on a stimulus plan. That's porktacular!  Keep an eye on how the dollars get spent at Stimulus Watch. Will the doorbells ($99,600) get installed okay in Laurel, MS?  And once they're installed, will the 2 jobs created by this remain? Stock market meandered up today after yesterday's sell-off.  Yesterday, the blame was on the stimulus package.  Today, the credit goes to the stimulus package.  Word that congressional officials have agreed on a comprehensive economic stimulus plan provided ...

Stimulus Watch: Web Watchdog for the Stimulus Package
Business Pundit — StimulusWatch is a new wiki that uses online feedback to hold the government accountable for its elephantine stimulus package. From the website: StimulusWatch.org was built to help the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend. We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects. These projects are not part of the stimulus bill. They are ...

StimulusWatch.Org
The Big Picture — ... for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant, and Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, Justice Department programs that provide money to hire security personnel and equipment. 10. Schools - a new federal program is proposed to provide federal funds to modernize school buildings. Note that the people behind this site include mostly George Mason University researchers and Open Source advocates. > ...

Stimulus Watch: See What's Proposed by State
CARPE DIEM — From Stimulus Watch, here's a list of proposed projects by state to potentially be funded by the stimulus package. From the Stimulus Watch website: The Obama White House has begun taking the first steps to keep its promise to be the most transparent and accountable administration in history. However, it has yet to provide the type of interactive accountability tool you see here. Because legislative and executive activity on stimulus spending is moving so quickly, we feel its ...

Would web surveillance of protection work?
Peter Gallagher — In our paper for the Evenett and Baldwin book on 'murky protectionism', Andrew Stoler and I outline a surveillance mechanism for the G20 that we think will dissuade governments from making regulations that would harm world trade (further, see the graph at left.) The mechanism we propose has not been used previously to expose protectionism but it is certainly in use in other contexts to bring policies under the spotlight of public scrutiny. For example, I referred a couple of weeks ago to recovery.gov which the Obama administration is using to report on ...

New Podcast: ‘A More Transparent Federal Government’
Cato @ Liberty — ... Online technology offers President Obama more opportunities to increase government transparency than any president before him, says Jerry Brito,  creator of StimulusWatch.org and senior fellow at the ...