Transparent Errors

Donn Janes has announced today that he plans to run for the US House of Representatives in Tennessee’s 11^th, 14^th, 32^nd, 13^th, 47^th, 29^th and 00 districts, because even imaginary people need to be represented in today’s volatile economy. Of course I was kidding about running in these districts, because quite frankly they don’t even exist. What I am referring to is the latest release posted on the Recovery.gov website, showing the number of jobs created or saved and how much of the stimulus money was spent to save or create them. The site lists several districts that don’t even exists, and this isn’t just for the state of Tennessee, many other states have reported the same problem. Now I am sure that this is somehow a data representation error on the part of this website, since I do work with many web developers, this can happen, but hopefully never in a production environment. What makes this error worst is that we, the American tax payers, shelled out an astounding $18 million dollars for this website. For that price tag, this website should be able to get its facts correct. Even more disturbing is that these errors have been present for more than 24 hours. Every web developer I’ve worked with that is worth his or her salt, would work tirelessly to have this error resolved in hours, not days.

So let’s talk about the data that looks to be correct, at least it is data for a district that actually exists. The 8^th District, for example, the district that I am running for Congress in, I might add. This district received $185 million dollars which is credited to saving 235 jobs. So $185 Million divided by 235 equals $788,562 per job saved or created. Since the median household income for the State of Tennessee as of 2007 was $42,389, these jobs had better have one heck of a dental plan. We could have saved $175 million dollars by just giving them the median salary, which amounts to $9.9 million dollars.

This is one of the reasons I have chosen to run for Congress. We need leaders who solve problems, not just throw money at them. If we are to ever achieve sustainable long term job growth we need to have capital investment in this country. There currently is approximately $17 Trillion dollars of capital sitting off our shores, in banks in the Cayman Islands and others sheltering this capital from our oppressive tax system. We need that capital invested in our country, so that we can get back to creating, building and manufacturing again. This is the sustainable growth I am talking about. This is a stimulus package I can agree to. I want our country to get back to business, and soon. If not, all that we will be known for creating will be laws.

See the Recovery website at: http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllCD&statecode=TN

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Donn's Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.