Don’t forget your squares.
recovery.gov launched today.
Its mission is to provide transparency into how the US government is spending the money from the stimulus act that President Obama signed on February 17, 2009.
They have a chart showing the big buckets of where the money is going:
(as of now, you can see it here)
The “Other” dot represents $8 billion. The area of it should therefore be 1/36 (288/8) of the “Tax Relief” dot. If you grab a pixel ruler, you’ll see that they did it right, ignoring rounding errors.
This is in marked contrast to JP Morgan, as chronicled by Robert Cringley. So this could be a good sign.
The site promises lots more data in the coming months, so we’ll be looking to put together interesting charts. In the meantime, here’s a more interactive version of the chart. If you go to the full size chart, you can play around (switch between a bar chart and a points chart, etc):
