Assessing the Stimulus

By Brad

At App-Rising, Goeff Daily assesses the broadband stimulus effort to date and doesn’t like what he sees:

The original purpose of the stimulus was to get money flowing quickly to create jobs. We’re now more than eight months in and no money’s gone out. So the stimulus has failed to get money flowing quickly.

The stimulus has also failed when it comes to creating jobs. Not only has no money gone out to help create these jobs, but it seems like no one’s even seriously talking about the broadband stimulus in terms of creating jobs any more.

Instead, most of the discussions center around fixing America’s broadband shortcomings, but on that front the stimulus has failed too as people are waking up to the fact that $7 billion isn’t near enough to solve all our broadband problems.

So that’s the big picture of how the stimulus as a whole is failing: it’s not working quickly enough, it’s not creating jobs, and it’s not up to the task of fixing all our broadband woes. But it’s important to note that the process itself also seems to have failed.

Daily believes the national broadband effort can still succeed, but unless things start picking up—always a challenge when it comes to government—success will be harder and harder to achieve.