Heckuva job, stimulators

Here is the graph that was used to sell the stimulus in February, updated with later unemployment numbers:



Obviously this new data means we need more government spending, as our enlightened technocrats from the left will surely tell us.

It's like the Iraq war, man. When something isn't working as planned and in fact producing an outcome worse than your original projected baseline, clearly the patient needs more medicine. Let's hear it for a stimulus surge!

Dig us deeper, man...

As Paul Krugman preemptively wrote:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now [this happened], is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

According to Obama's economists, he did get something wrong--the plan didn't limit unemployment relative to their baseline. It is not the case, as Krugman feared, that the stimulus was too small--but rather, even with a more moderate stimulus, things are worse than the predicted non-stimulus baseline!

The real problem here is that projected baselines of economic performance are always uncertain. And no matter how bad employment numbers get, lefties like Krugman will argue things would be worse without their spending programs. That's the magic of "jobs created or saved".