Maryland has set up a website to track how and where funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- the stimulus -- are being spent in the state.Capital News Service, operated by the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, interviewed a public policy professor at the university to get her views on how things are going. Carmen Reinhart's opinion on the situation seems to be pretty much in line with those of most others who are assessing the current state of affairs. In a nutshell, the economy is still tanking -- people are still losing jobs and home foreclosures continue to rise.
But, Reinhart says, the recovery is making a difference, or, as she puts it, "I think the recession would have been worse absent the stimulus. The fact that we observe in nearly every sector some worrisome signs shouldn't be taken as a sign our fiscal policy doesn't work."
We should hope so. After committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the recovery, if it isn't working, heaven help us.
According to Maryland's recovery website, Statestat (www.gov.state.md.us/statestat/overview.asp#), more than $4 billion in stimulus money has been sent Maryland's way to help its schools and businesses. The site credits the money with directly creating 4,464 jobs. It also lists figures for "indirect" and "induced" jobs, pushing the total to 14,082 -- more than three times the number of direct jobs.
Just how many jobs -- especially indirect and induced jobs -- the stimulus money has created and saved nationwide has been a matter of discussion in recent weeks. Those numbers are open to interpretation. Some say they are too low; others say they're too high.
Some things aren't open to interpretation, such as the $300 million grant that went to SAIC-Frederick , a subsidiary of the giant government contracting firm. The grant will be used for cancer and AIDS research. It's also a fact that some smaller Maryland businesses have gotten in on the recovery spending.
For example, a veteran-owned Upper Marlboro business was hired by Veterans Affairs Medical Centers, which received $9.6 million in ARRA money, to do repairs to the VA Perry Point Medical Center. Photo Science, a digital mapping company out of Bowie, received a $317,539 contract to help update nautical charts for the Great Lakes. Blades School of Hair Design in California, Md., was awarded $101,080 of the $91 million in ARRA funding allotted to the state's Pell grant education funding program.
So, what is one to think when, on one hand, billions of stimulus dollars are pouring into the state, while on the other hand, unemployment and home foreclosures continue to rise?
The huge unanswered questions in all this are (1) what would things be like today without ARRA, and (2) what will they be like in the years ahead because of ARRA? Unfortunately, the first can never be answered with certainty. As for the second, we'll just have to wait -- and hold our breaths in the meantime.
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