De Omnibus Dubitandum

This item is lifted from Matthew Collins.

I hope you have a bottle of scotch nearby…

Eighteen million dollars.

It doesn’t sound like a whole lot these days. I think that’s because our perspective is a little off. Just think of what you could do with eighteen million dollars. Just think of what I could do with eighteen million dollars.

Why am I going off about eighteen million dollars?

Because that’s how much the Feds are spending on a website, a website that tracks – take a deep breath – stimulus spending.

After all, you can’t rightly spend over US$700 Billion on digging ditches and repairing sidewalks without the most expensive website in human history, to catalog your spectacular waste of wealth.

Now we don’t all own websites. So we can’t know what a glorious waste of money this one is. Luckily for us, Dave Hitt breaks out the brass tacks, “A big, busy e-commerce site costs $50k-$100k to set up, and five or six grand a month in hosting fees.”

“Even if Uncle Sam was contracting for a site to be built from scratch it shouldn’t cost more than five or six hundred thousand dollars for design and implementations, and no more than 100K a year to keep it up and running.”

So according to Hitt’s estimation, US$18 Million should bag you at least twenty websites and enough server time to keep them running for twenty years each.

Now I’m not going to go off on the fact that this is just one of several websites being set up for the stimulus effort. I’m not even going to go into the fact that Smartronics – a company whose work is so good it warrants US$18 million – has made US$20,000 in donations to House majority leader Hoyer.

Instead, I just wanted to pass along one of Dave’s observations… “Eighteen million bucks for a single web site. This is the same government that stupid people believe will bring down the price of health care if we socialize medicine…”

“Yeah, that’ll work.”