MONEY: Exploding Dye Packs Could Help Track Stimulus Funding

  Seems like everyone wants to help track the stimulus money pouring out of DC these days  --do-gooders and money-makers alike. 

Ever helpful, I've thought up some low-cost ways to help track the money, so we know where it's going (and can get there first):

1.  Exploding dye packs (like in bank heist flicks)

2.  Sequential serial numbers (on most forms of US currency).

3.  "Stimulus" stamp on designated bills.

4.  Call-in 800 number or website for taxpayers to note stimulus sightings.

See any stimulus money on your way to work today?

Comments

[Dick Schutz]

Point well-taken!

One wonders what Kool-aid is driving the do-gooders dreams. We know what drives the money-makers. We will have CYA compliance paperwork out the ears, but with fed, state, and local funds and with el-hi competing with other public services for scarce dollars, the tracking methodology you suggest is as good as it gets.

The best eventuality of the ed stim would be to make obvious that "categorical" federal educational aid is obsolete and fatally flawed policy. Disclosure of all the "programs" and recipients of funds from each program under ESEA, IDEA, and IES would reveal an interrelated complex of bureaucrats and "non profits" that is far more influential in maintaining the el-hi status quo than the much-maligned "teacher unions." All players in the complex are altogether unaccountable.

Where is responsibility and transparency where we could really use it?

[Sherman Dorn]

It's not the stimulus money that needs the dye packs. That's more appropriate for the Fed's "quantitative easing." But you can be sure that where there are identifiable dollars going to identifiable projects, that'll all get quite a bit of publicity. It's the "identifiable" that's the tough part since the stabilization funding is precisely what it looks like, to prop up existing state and local operations.