One hundred fifty million. That’s the number of hits the Obama Administration’s Recovery.gov website has received since it went live only a couple of weeks ago, according to an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official testifying yesterday before a Senate committee. It’s clear that the American people have a hunger for information about the Recovery Act that so many are counting on to help propel the country out of the current economic slump.
The Administration has committed itself to making the economic recovery plan transparent and accountable, but as with all complex undertakings, the details will make all the difference. The new Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR)—co-chaired by OMB Watch and Good Jobs First—is bird-dogging those details.
CAR has just submitted a 15-page memorandum to OMB providing an initial set of recommendations on how the Recovery Act reporting system should be structured. Our key proposal is that the system should capture information from all public and private-sector organizations through which Recovery Act funds flow—every “ultimate organizational end-user” of the money.
In other words, every contractor, subcontractor, and sub-subcontractor would simply enroll and report through one central online registry. That data would be accessible to the public in raw form as well in a machine-readable format that, through a system of tagging, will allow results to be automatically aggregated. Any user would be able to search for and display information by state, by city, by agency or corporation, by project, by ZIP code, etc. As we said last week, we want millions of eyeballs on the money. And it sure looks like millions of eyeballs are ready to go!
Since job creation is one of the primary goals of the Recovery plan, the memo includes recommendations for collecting meaningful information not only on the number of jobs but also their type and quality. This means gathering company-specific data on total hours of work generated (by broad occupational categories), number of workers, total payroll and extent of healthcare coverage.
CAR intends to refine and amplify its recommendations to OMB as the Recovery.gov process moves forward and those hit numbers rise into the billions.
clawback.org 
March 7, 2009 at 1:03 pm |
President Obama and Congress: Wrong Direction
Why are President Obama and Congress rejecting other economic solutions? Is this their first cover-up? No need for more taxpayer bailouts, economic stimulus spending or earmarks, if politicians would do the following: First, repeal all sales taxes and replace the lost revenue with an import tax/tariff on imported labor and manufactured goods. Second, repeal all local tax incentives that shift business costs to taxpayers and that create poverty wage jobs (click on http://www.flyergroup.com and enter Brent Pittman in the search for details within letters);or change these incentives to pay a living wage, minimum wage of $14/hour (parent with one child). Third, re-regulate banks and financial corporations (Obama progressing). Fourth, enact a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies (Obama progressing); but, rebate this money through tax incentives for drilling and building refineries (including ethanol ones in other countries) as well as eliminating the $.54/gallon import tax on sugar cane ethanol. This strategy will slow these companies from using excess profits to enrich executives and to buy company stock. Fifth, increase taxes on fuel guzzling vehicles, wealthy individuals and corporations (eliminating corporate welfare and tax loopholes; Obama progressing) to pay for the Wall Street bailout, the Iraq war and to pump more oil in Iraq for export. These strategies will lower the $11 TRILLION ($14 TRILLION forecasted) taxpayer debt leading to a stronger dollar that will reduce inflation and increase the number of good paying jobs with benefits for American citizens.
Brent Pittman Brownsburg, IN
March 8, 2009 at 1:46 pm |
With millions of unemployed highly skilled Americans, Obama should cancel all guest workers visas (h1b and l1). These visas have been used by Indian Consulting Companies to replace Americans with cheap labor.
If Obama does this, he will open up jobs in Engineering, Information Technology and Science. These are all high paying jobs. These visas have been used to age discriminate older Americans specially those older than 35. America has to wake up and help it’s citizens first.
These are temporary visas and not immigrant visas.