Another update to the chart used by the Obama administration to promote its stimulus package. (Real figures charted as red dots.) Professor Steve Horwitz says that it's time to call it a failure. It's hard to disagree. Even on its own terms, the stimulus has not delivered the jobs promised. In fact, the situation is worse than the projection of unemployment without the recovery plan.

Those of us who see a recession as a painful but necessary process of economic reorganization will be unsurprised. If there's been a period of investment in things people no longer want, you need a period where that investment and energy shifts to things people do want. (I wrote about this idea a few months ago.) Of course, it's impossible to show that the stimulus has made things worse than they would have been otherwise, but it's clear that it hasn't worked as it was supposed to.