At least it would make a really fun water slide.

I don't know how anyone could possibly say the stimulus has worked, or is working, or is doing what anyone hoped it would do.

Especially when you see this.

It's not just the sharp decline in jobs lost that is so stunning, it's also the length of time that they've been falling.

In case you forget, the stimulus was passed over eight months ago. The 1980 recession almost lasted as long as the time since the stimulus was passed.

We were sold the stimulus on the promise that we would start seeing its effects "almost immediately". Now imagine if instead they told us that eight months after passage we still wouldn't see things turning around. Think it would have had a chance in hell of passing?

Didn't think so.

And it's getting worse.

The Labor Department said Thursday that new jobless claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 531,000 last week, from an upwardly revised 520,000 the previous week. Wall Street economists had expected only a slight increase, according to Thomson Reuters.

And as Ed Morrissey notes:

Initial jobless claims in this stratospheric level indicate that firms are still shedding jobs, not just showing a reluctance to rehire. The number of unemployed people continue to rise, and many of them are now falling out the back end of the statistics, as the AP acknowledges:

When those [extended benefits] programs are included, the total number of recipients dropped to 8.8 million in the week ending Oct. 3, the latest data available, down about 50,000 from the previous week. That decline is likely due to recipients running out of benefits, rather than finding jobs, economists say.

What a mess.