Last January, the President’s economic advisors made some predictions about the course of the economy with and without the President’s stimulus plan. This may have been unwise, because it gives us a benchmark by which to measure how well the stimulus is working. As noted on the Innocent Bystanders blog (via Instapundit), we are just about where we were predicted to be without the stimulus package:
As you can see, unemployment is tracking the “Without Recovery Plan” curve predicted by the President’s own team. In fact, we’re slightly worse.
This will come as no surprise to those who heard economist Robert Barro’s caution that for peacetime stimulus, the Keynes multiplier is “insignificantly different than zero.” That means that spending all that “stimulus” money accomplishes nothing at all, other than spending the money. All that has been accomplished is a massive accumulation of debt, unprecedented in history without a world war:
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey expands on this. (Via the Corner.)
