Has Obama's fiscal stimulus package been effective so far?

Back when President Obama was arguing for the fiscal stimulus package, his economic team created a graph forecasting the effects of the fiscal stimulus. The blue lines below show the expected unemployment rate with and without the fiscal stimulus. The maroon dots show the actual unemployment rate so far.

The fact that the unemployment situation is substantially worse than expected didn't prevent President Obama from bragging back in late May that, "In these last few months, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has saved or created nearly 150,000 jobs."

It is impossible to empirically measure how many jobs have been saved, so the "saved or created" numbers Obama uses are complete fabrications based on the White House's own shifting macroeconomic estimates. No matter how bad things get, Obama can always claim—without evidence—that things would have been worse, therefore he saved jobs. The gullible news media have been falling for it.

That said, the bulk of the stimulus package takes effect in late 2009 and in 2010, so we should not expect it to have had much economic impact yet.