By Dave Hitt on Jul 10, 2009 in Bad Business, Featured, Politics, Yeah - That'll Work

This morning someone had one of those talking heads infotainment morning “news” shows on in another room, and I was half listening to a story about the stimulus bill. Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on roadside signs telling us that millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on road work. Toward the end of the segment the host casually mentioned that we’re spending eighteen million dollars on a web site that tracks the package’s spending.

I figured I’d research that later, but didn’t have to – an article about it showed up in a tweet from the Cato Institute. Yep, eighteen million.

I run three websites: davehitt.com, which includes The Facts, the Quick Hitts podcast, and this blog, and the separate sites The Podcast Peer Awards and Blood Witness. It costs me less than $200 a year. Granted, we’re talking a shared server and maybe 1500 unique visitors on a busy day. But I’ve also worked for an e-commerce company and am familiar with the costs involved. 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.

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.