OREGON FORUM



By Nathan Newman and Gordon Lafer

In order to comply with new transparency requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), state governments across the country are scrambling to report to the public how they spend recovery dollars. In just the last week, the White House’s count of state transparency websites has jumped from 10 to 25. Unfortunately, none of the state and government websites that are accounting for the recovery funds report the number of jobs created by private contractors -- but without such data, the sites are close to meaningless.

Fortunately, Oregon is leading an effort to require contractors to report the number of jobs they create, as well as the hours worked and wages received by their employees. These proposed requirements would provide Oregonians a website that ensures their tax money actually goes toward creating quality jobs.

The benefits of such a site are clear. If contractors are creating quality jobs with recovery money, they will get more. If they aren’t, the state can stop funding them and target resources to contractors that are creating jobs. If we are serious about using recovery dollars to turn the economy around, we must make it a top priority to adopt these new standards.

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