I was curious as to what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 actually said, so I went and looked it up on Thomas.loc.gov, where the Library of Congress posts legislative information from Congress. The final version is the one that was "Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate".

The PDF version runs 407 pages. While I was scanning through, the section about Electronic Medical Records caught my eye, since that's what I do for a living. It goes on for almost 50 pages. My eyes glazed over. :-)

As stated in the bill, its purposes are:

Statement of Purposes- The purposes of this Act include the following:
(1) To preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery.
(2) To assist those most impacted by the recession.
(3) To provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health.
(4) To invest in transportation, environmental protection, and other infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits.
(5) To stabilize State and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.

Some amounts I ran into as I went along:

• $100,000,000 for school lunches
• $500,000,000 for WIC
• $$2,500,000,000 for broadband improvements in rural areas, in support of distance learning and telemedicine programs
• $4,700,000,000 _more_ for the "Broadband Technology Opportunities Program"
• $830,000,000 for NOAA (and, presumably, the National Weather Service)
• $225,000,000 to combat violence against women

I'll read some more later and update this post.