On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for October. It's a look back at the good old days of Fiscal Year 2009, with all the spending, and borrowing and loss of revenue...wait, did I say "good old days?" Let's examine CBO's goodbye to the not-so-great fiscal year that was.

Ever since it's passage (even before), conservative voices in Congress have complained about the $787 economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The nut of the complaints is that the Act does nothing for the economy or the American people while adding nearly a trillion dollars to the federal deficit. So effective, apparently, is this charge, that the word "stimulus" has become a dirty word. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke had to walk back his statement that a second stimulus was being "hotly discussed and very seriously considered" by some members of Congress and the Obama Administration.

As we continue to go over the recipient data the Recovery Board released late Friday, another article by the AP today shed an interesting light on another factor in Recovery Act spending. While many commentators are focusing on how fast the money is being spent, or how many jobs are being created per Recovery Act dollar (a particularly inane exercise), it's important that we figure out where that money is going, and that it's going to those who need it most. As the article reminds us, the stimulus is supposed to target "economically distressed" communities, but it can be difficult to actually deliver money to these communities.