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The debate rages on, even since this article was printed way back in February:

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Yet I'm guessing you don't think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You've read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you've heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it's almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.

Egg-zactly!

This precisely sums up the rhetoric:

The reasons for the stimulus's middling popularity aren't a mystery. The unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and many families are struggling. Saying that things could have been even worse doesn't exactly inspire. Liberals don't like the stimulus because they wish it were bigger. Republicans don't like it because it's a Democratic program. The Obama administration hurt the bill's popularity by making too rosy an economic forecast upon taking office.

But how does this compare to past financial crises?

Around the world over the last century, the typical financial crisis caused the jobless rate to rise for almost five years, according to work by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. On that timeline, our rate would still be rising in early 2012. Even that may be optimistic, given that the recent crisis was so bad. As Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson (Republicans both) and many others warned in 2008, this recession had the potential to become a depression.

Yet the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year.

For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. "It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been," Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight's chief economist, says. "I think everyone would have to acknowledge that's a good thing."

The stimulus package HAS been a good - and essential - thing that has helped stanch the panic of late '08 early '09, and has hopefully bought us time to get back on our feet.

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