What A Few Trillion Dollars Buys You

Got your green shoots right here:

Inflation Dept: Consumer Price Index up 0.2 percent.

Delivery Dept: Freight Transportation Services Index up 0.7 percent.

Real Estate Dept: Highest quarterly foreclosure number since the beginning of time. (Hey, how'd that get in there?)

Your Great-Grandchildren's Debt Dept: U.S. Treasury note prices down, yields up.

Infrastructure Dept: President stands on large mound of dirt and gravel in Fairfax County.

Hardworking American Working Families Working Hard Dept: Stimulus jobs created at $72,408 per. This is not as costly as the $187,000 to $275,000 the Obama Administration's own numbers indicated each new job would cost.  Remember, for every dollar you spend on stimulus you're actually putting $1.55 into the economy, through the help of the multiplier fairies, whose magical effects were explained by Christina D. Romer back in January [pdf].

That January report is worth reading, by the way, for Romer's stunningly prescient calculation that in a nightmare land without a stimulus package, unemployment might peak at 8.8 percent. (How does this crack economic team do it? They're like Cassandra von Nostradamus.)