The Obama team hasn’t been able to substantiate its claim that its economic policies have been of help. Now there is this:

By now, the only defense Democrats can mount of the Obama stimulus programs is that the economy would have been worse without them. There’s no way to disprove this counterfactual, but now we have some empirical evidence other than 9.6% unemployment and 1.6% growth.

It seems as though the $2.85 billion cash-for-clunkers program generated nothing much at all. Car purchases shifted to the months during which the bonanza was available, but “then it quickly hurt sales by about the same amount, in effect stealing purchases from the future.” Just as conservative critics predicted. And a new study by two university economists tells us there is no proof that it benefited the rest of the economy. (“There was ‘no noticeable difference’ in economic outcomes among the 957 metropolitan areas they studied. They did detect an economic blip in cities where the auto industry is concentrated but note that the rebound can’t be disentangled from the Chrysler and GM bailouts.”)

In short, we’ve spent billions and billions to no measurable benefit, an outcome expected by critics of Keynesian economics, who analogize fiscal-stimulus gambits to scooping water from one end of a lake and pouring it back into the other end. There’s no net gain, no mystical multiplier that raises the water level.

The Obama team and its spinners have oodles of excuses — the stimulus wasn’t big enough, the Republicans created uncertainty (I can’t begin to fathom how that one is supposed to make sense), and we should be appreciative that the economy hasn’t been much worse. The problem with all that is a lack of evidence. What we have is puddles of red ink, a limping economy, and high unemployment, which the Obami now concede will last a very long time. In private industry, a team that returned results like these would be fired en masse. In politics, the voters run the show and are likely to do just that.