Eye on the Stimulus

This is the latest from our new Stimulus blog.

Here's what new this morning: Commerce officials are holding a hearing this morning on broadband grants in the stimulus package. The Agriculture Department announced that it's starting to distribute funds. The New York Times profiles watchdog-in-chief Earl Devaney. And The National Law Journal questions whether the stimulus falls short on courthouses.

Steve Coll, the New Yorker writer and biographer of the bin Ladens, is taking his pen - er, keyboard - to the stimulus act. He's blogging it line by line.

Project of the day: Bike lockers in Portland, Ore.

We added seven states' recovery Web sites to our growing list of fiscal transparency and stimulus tracking efforts.

Like the sites we corralled earlier, most are works in progress. A few, however, preview features that look pretty promising. Pennsylvania, one of the additions, breaks stimulus benefits down by county in an interactive map. The state plans to list specific projects that way, too.

As always, if you dig up any more state transparency sites, please let us know.

The additions are: Alabama, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Vermont.

See the chart of state transparency and stimulus web sites.

The stimulus bill’s three biggest tax breaks for individuals add up to more than $200 billion and consume the lion’s share of the tax side. They are the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) reduction, the expanded child tax credit and President Obama’s campaign-pledged "Making Work Pay" credit.

A household’s earnings are the main factor in determining how much – if any – a given individual will gain through these tax cuts, but income isn’t distributed evenly around the country. With help from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy’s data on the state-by-state impact of the cuts, we crunched the numbers to find out where the tax benefits are going.

Regions where incomes are high, like the Northeast, have much more to gain from the nearly $70 billion AMT reduction, which will keep some middle-class households (for instance, couples earning around $70,000 in 2009) from paying higher taxes next year. Meanwhile, a change to eligibility for the child tax credit – a cut that registers a mere $14 billion nationwide – brings a disproportionate bounty to the South, especially the Gulf Coast. Overall, the three breaks bring the deepest cuts to the northeastern states, Wyoming and Minnesota.

Take a look at our map here to see where each of the top breaks makes the biggest splash.

This is the latest from our new Stimulus blog.

As many as 300,000 illegal immigrants could end up with stimulus jobs, reports the USA Today. South Florida cities have hired lobbyists to make their pitches for stimulus money. And Atlanta area officials released their list of "shovel-ready" road projects.

Police were on the radar over the weekend after President Obama's visit Friday to Columbus, Ohio, where he highlighted how some of the $2 billion for law enforcement assistance helped save the jobs of 25 police recruits who were going to be laid off. According to the White House, the stimulus will allow San Francisco to increase police patrols in high-crime areas; Bowling Green, Ky., to upgrade radio equipment; and Butler County, Pa., to construct a secure entrance to transport prisoners into the courthouse. See how much money your city is getting.

Project of the day: Sprinklers in the Olympian Apartments in Olympia, Wash., where a fire killed an elderly woman in 2004.