The problem about making claims about the future is that the future hasn't happened yet. See this chart above - the blue lines are the predictions of the White House economic team about unemployment rate with or without the stimulus (report from Jan 10, 2009). Darker blue shows the projected best case - a lower unemployment rate that is 'lower' precisely because of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The lighter blue line is the projected worst case unemployment rate without the stimulus. The problem is that the real numbers (the black dots) show that the actual rate is higher than even the White House's worst case scenario.
Are we to believe that the stimulus made unemployment worse, or that without the stimulus, the current 9.7% unemployment would have been even higher?
The chart is from Innocent Bystanders and I originally saw it at Greg Mankiw's blog.
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