In my weekly column at American Issues Project, I take a deeper look at the stimulus package, its aim, and its poor marksmanship.  In particular, this graph from Innocent Bystanders tells the story of not only how Porkulus failed, but how it wasn’t necessary in the first place:

One aspect of this graph didn’t get much attention.  Note that the lines for both predictions from Christine Romer and Jared Bernstein show that unemployment will return to 5% regardless of government intervention by 2014, and by 2011 the difference between the two becomes nearly negligible.  The point of the stimulus, then, was to avoid the bubble — which we clearly have not avoided.

So was Porkulus irrelevant?  Read the column to see my conclusion.