What would an utterly failed stimulus plan look like? Something like this, perhaps:
Not only has the stimulus not worked as well as advertised, it’s actually made things quite a bit worse than the predicted baseline. Meanwhile, with a completely straight face:
US President Barack Obama said Wednesday his mammoth 787 billion dollar stimulus plan had saved or created 150,000 jobs in the first 100 days since it cleared Congress.
Of course, the president will claim that things would have been even worse with the stimulus package. That claim has the great virtue (for a politician) of being untestable and therefore unrefutable. But, it does completely contradict the predictions he used to sell the package.
(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)
UPDATE: Even Democrats are starting to mock the “save or create” line. (Via Instapundit.)
UPDATE: The author of the graph above has revised the graph, saying he was off by one month. This doesn’t change much, but makes the stimulus package’s performance look a tiny bit worse. I’ve replaced the graph with the new one.
