Today marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA or Recovery Act). We're going to put up some more substantive posts later, but I thought these graphs in the New York Times really get to the heart of the "did it work" question.

Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.

If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?

Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.

Despite the nearly 2 million jobs that wouldn't have existed without the act or the additional 2 to 3 percentage points in additional GDP growth, only 6 percent of the public thinks the Recovery Act has already created a substantial number of new jobs, while only 41 percent think it eventually will.

This is probably driven by the current awful unemployment rate, but the enormity of the gulf between ARRA (and economy watchers) and the general public is striking. And this is all despite the fact that Recovery Act spending is the most transparent in history.

Image by Flickr user smcgee used under a Creative Commons license.