Stimulus update

The Washington Post points out that it takes money to spend money:

To send out $14 billion in supplemental checks to most Social Security recipients, the federal economic stimulus package passed in February included $70 million to cover administrative costs -- much of it overtime for workers handling the checks and queries over the phone.

The Health Resources and Services Administration has hired 134 people to oversee $2.5 billion in spending and has spent $326,000 on new workstations at its Rockville offices.

The 50-person agency -- with a budget of $84 million -- created to audit the spending just spent $204,000 to outfit its offices in downtown Washington.

And the Transportation Department plans to hire two people at its headquarters to help estimate the number of jobs being created by transportation infrastructure spending. This is despite job estimates that will be provided by the states.

Remember, money spent by government is first taken out of the economy via taxes and borrowing and then put back in, except this way you get back less than you put in because of the bureaucracy.

I wonder what the administrative costs of a tax cut would have been?

Update: Oh, and there's also the problem of fraud, with the figure of $50 billion being thrown around.