As of early May, a little less than 4% of stimulus funds had been outlaid by the federal government, meaning that even less have actually been spent by state and local governments and other groups eligible for funds. Indeed, Vice President Biden’s first quarterly report to the President on the stimulus package provided little more than scattered, and somewhat questionable, anecdotes of the package’s success. Even the Council of Economic Advisers’ guidelines for estimating the job creating effects of AARA acknowledge the impossibility of knowing exactly – or even roughly – how many jobs the package has created. The administration’s best estimate – that 3.5 million jobs will be saved or created – is not verifiable.

What will, however, become very apparent over the next two years is the extent to which the stimulus package has set the stage for Americans to deal with a new normal (should El-Erian’s predictions come true).

Indeed, as Jared Diamond pointed out in The New York Times a year and a half ago, the rate of consumption in the United States was always going to decline, with or without the financial and economic crisis: our level of consumption was unsustainable given the growing consumption demands of other countries. But, more importantly, he noted that living standards would not necessarily suffer a similar fate. Western Europe’s rate of consumption, for example, is considerably lower than that of the United States, while nearly all measures of quality of life – such as life expectancy, health, infant mortality, financial stability after retirement, access to medical care, post-retirement benefits, vacation, public school quality, and support for the arts – are in fact higher.

So as El-Erian and others fret about decreased global growth and a heavy-handed government, we should be grading the stimulus both on its job-creating effects – a somewhat quixotic, but nevertheless indispensable task – and on the extent to which it lays the groundwork for the middle class to thrive in a United States of frugal consumers and moderate economic expansion.