Ten months ago, at the beginning of the great stimulus debate, President-elect Barack Obama’s economic advisers produced an unfortunate chart.

The chart plotted out two lines. One projected the unemployment rate through 2014 with a stimulus package; the other projected unemployment across the same period without it.

The first line — the hopeful line, the one that was used to sell $800 billion worth of stimulus — showed the rate of joblessness peaking this fall at 8 percent, and dropping swiftly thereafter. The second line — the no-stimulus scenario — showed unemployment peaking at 9 percent, holding there across 2010, and then declining in 2011 and 2012.

Now reality has produced numbers of its own. In every month since May, the...