Ed Morrissey found some great charts that undermine the vice president’s ongoing stimulus PR offensive. Gauging by the administration’s own estimates of the effect the stimulus would have on unemployment, it has been a total flop: The unemployment rate is exactly where the adminstration’s economists predicted it would be without the stimulus.
Of course, the great thing about the administration’s position (the act of “political genius,” as Mankiw put it), is that Obama can always move the goalposts. One can always play with the numbers and assert that things would have been worse without the stimulus. But it would be wrong to call the stimulus a total failure: It has already served its primary purpose, which was to deliver a big, gift-wrapped spending package to the public-sector unions and green lobbies that helped get Obama elected.