Was the Stimulus Irrelevant?

Ed Morrissey has a great piece at the American Issues Project that brings up the question, "Did the historic stimulus package actually do anything?

In early January, a joint paper [PDF file] by Dr. Christine Romer, then the nominee to chair the Presidential Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein from Joe Biden's advisory team painted a bleak view of a world without the off-budget stimulus plan. This paper drove the administration's agenda on the stimulus bill and helped formulate the calculus that gave a much higher priority to public-works projects as opposed to tax cuts and business incentives. Failure to act, Romer and Bernstein warned, could have dire consequences.

Figure 1 details the challenge better than the text does:

After the passage of the bill authorizing the off-budget spending of almost $800 billion, one might have thought that the crisis represented by the light-blue arc would be avoided. Guess again. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in April had risen to a peak of 8.9 percent, more than the doomsday scenario laid out by Romer and Bernstein in their January paper. In fact, March had exceeded the recovery-plan curve and the non-recovery plan curve, too, as this revised graph clearly shows: