Make room for communicating IMPACT, not just tracking expenditures.

What is the idea?

There are some terrific ideas here.  Leaving the outright sales pitches aside, much considered insight is to be found in both the ideas and the comments sections. But nearly all of the focus is on the tracking of expenditures and not on their intended impact. I find this troubling. While the tracking of expenditures is necessary and should be transparent (and is the jist of the question that was asked), it drives toward a "getting my fair share" perspective (evidenced by a number of comments), and away from the broader questions about whether and how the reinvestment leads to real recovery (and transformation), not just rescue. Moreover, many current performance measure are already too output focused (e.g., number of people served). I fear we will wind up with a long list of expenditures ranging from short-term employment to the purchase of paperclips, but not a real understanding of whether and how any of it made a difference. I would love to see a manyeyes/propublica-style version of impact, using predictive multipliers in combination with survey data and even anecdotal content (I know it's possible to contribute anecdotes right now, but we could turn a few into case studies). I could also imagine a site/service that did time series - investment against economic activity. I understand that the level of complexity we are talking about here boggles the mind - multiple data systems with different levels of proprietary content and multiple output formats tracking inapprorpriate targets. Still, we need try to track impact - even if we don't get it right, we need to do it. And we need to do it on recovery.gov, or the site will simple function as an audit. Not very interesting. Does not inspire confidence.

Brookings warns of a similar danger here. 

Why is it important?

We're already spending. We need to know where it goes, yes. But we also need to know whether it made a difference.