This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 9, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The stimulus plan passed in the Wii hours of the Obama administration is generating all sorts of data.

Some of it good, some of it terrible.

But bad data begets better data, at least over time.

Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center

at George Mason University.

He is co-creator of Stimulus Watch.org.

We spoke last week.

So the idea for Stimulus Watch happened before the stimulus was actually passed,

and this was back in October, November of last year when the

Congress and the president were pretty sure that they were going to pass a stimulus,

but there was actually consternation that there wouldn't be enough projects that would be

physically available to spend all the money

that they wanted to spend. There wouldn't be enough shovel-ready projects.

And so the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents all the localities in the country

who would be getting the money, said of course, no, no, no, we've got all the projects

you know, lined up if only we had the money.

And so they very helpfully surveyed all the localities and created a report that had all the projects that they would do if they had the money and they published this.

So this was a great opportunity for us. We took it all those projects, hundreds, tens of thousands of projects,

and we put them online in a database that made

it very easy for citizens to go online, type in their neighborhood, find the projects,

...