Government Spending in a Pandemic
The most recent health crisis has taken its toll on all of us, seeing how a government that is in charge of a recovering economy and the health of its people is using its finances was something that struck a chord with me in regard to my curiosity about what the people in power are doing with the power. Was there a difference between different categories? Are there people who receive more funding than others? These are questions that I sought to ask and find out, ultimately leading me to develop a deeper understanding of our government and the paradigm behind their spending habits.
To develop an understanding I looked at a specific data set from the timeline later in the covid-19 pandemic and organized the data so that I could look at the different categories of spending that our government is partaking in as well as the largest receivers of these payments. I found the highest average of spending within our government when going for purchases is with the Xerox corporation. The Xerox Corporation is a paper and printing company which makes sense as there are many forms and processes that need to be handled within the government. I found that the largest spending purchases were personnel related to ZZ Member’s services which is a high-end dining service. These purchases make up larger purchases within our data set and help us to develop a better understanding of what a majority of spending is being directed towards. The lowest category of use is the “Transportation of things” category which sees the least use by far with the largest amount of funding being $3949.81 in comparison to the $37,268,340.52 being spent on equipment for reference. This shows that we are dealing with a very large range of overall funds. It helps to understand the scale that we are working with in regards to the dataset as well when it comes to painting a scene in comparison of all the different categories of spending together and how one would go about doing that. I found that a box and whisker plot was very useful in conveying the ranges not only within the categories with the different points of spending themselves but also in relation to the categories in relation to each other.
Seeing that different payee(s) arose as top receivers for different payment categories was surprising and struck me as an outlier. Seeing that Leslie Zukrow was a max payee for travel and rent, communications, & utilities was something that stood out to me as the trending of spending in both regards is related to more personal cases rather than pushing a governing agenda forward.
Looking at how different categories were divided was also interesting to me because equipment and supplies and materials are different payment categories but they seem to cover the same thing just with different maximum receiving payees, with the Xerox corporation and Anthony Zona representing each respectively. Through research into the different payee outliers, we can see that usually there are multiple meanings that can be construed as to how to define what is being paid and what for as the supplies and materials associated with Anthony Zona are related to cameras and electronics are given their history.
Looking deeper into the data we can see that the averages line up with average purchasing prices of different things such as rent having a mean of $1988 and travel expenses having an average expense of $508 which is just shy of the average 1st class seat from Los Angelas to Washington D.C if you were to buy a ticket a couple of weeks in advance. On average former personnel gets $38,164 dedicated towards benefits for them but it fails to show in the dataset the funding that is dedicated towards us the people, the ones who were struggling through the failing economy without any safety nets in place to protect us then or now. Looking at the spending habits of those in power makes us tilt our heads to the side as we ask if these are the people we are to trust our livelihoods to. Like the differences in spending between categories, there are ranges between how much is spent within different things as well as a range in how quality a leader is and how they can help to contribute to a community, and nation that is already at odds with itself.
