Remember back before he was sworn in, when his economic team was pushing that chart that showed unemployment topping out at eight percent or so if we gave him whatever moneybomb he asked for? Those days are looooong gone; now, instead of talking about how much higher the unemployment rate is than he thought it’d be, we’re talking about how much higher it could have been without that $787 billion bomb. And the nice thing about that, of course, is that he can slap any horrifying figure he wants on his worst-case scenario to make the current figures look rosy. For the moment he’s restricting himself to “12 or 13 or 15 percent,” but if he’s staring at a giant Republican wave come October, I bet that estimate will bump up to 20 or 25 percent in no time. Keep moving those goalposts, champ.

Oh, by the way: Not only is it entirely untrue that “every economist who’s looked at it said that the recovery [act] did its job,” but not even every Keynesian who’s looked at said it did its job. Click the image to watch.