On the ground, the stimulus is working. Nationally, who knows?

Let's get right to it. This is the final article in a 12-piece series about the stimulus. That means that in the back of your mind, you're hoping to get an answer to the one question—the only question—that we've all asked since this thing began:

Is it working?

No offense, kind reader, but that's an awful question. I've just finished a three-week road trip into the heart of the stimulus and across the country. (If you haven't been obsessively cataloging the travels, here's a recap.) I drove 6,500 miles, stopped at 10 different stimulus hot spots, and met dozens of people affected by this economy. The is-it-working question sucks because the stimulus (and this country) is too big to offer up a uniform answer. Just because the stimulus is good for a solar company in Colorado does not mean it's delivering results for a mayor in Albuquerque. To answer with confidence would be to conflate 300 million people and $787 billion into one quick sound bite. This isn't cable TV.

I understand why you can't help but ask, though. You're a taxpayer whose money is helping fund a monstrous, $787 billion program to get the economy moving again. You read headlines about a $1.1 trillion federal deficit that will only rise in the near future. You've got a new president whose economic legacy is largely going to be defined by whether or not the stimulus succeeds ... whatever that may mean.

And so let's pretend I played your game. If I were to give you an answer (to your question that I don't believe in), it would be because you're a news consumer and I'm a news provider. It is, in theory, my job to answer questions like these. And the people I've met along the way would want me to answer the question; they'd want me to tell you that, yes, the stimulus is working. Jobs are being created. Homes are being saved. Families are being kept afloat.

But that's not the whole story, and that's why I can't offer you a comforting smile while I tell you that everything is going to be all right. The folks getting the stimulus say it's working because they're getting the stimulus. For the rest of us looking in, it's more complicated. Once you zoom out to the national level, the way you judge the stimulus gets so objective that you lose sight of the localized stories. As I wrote when Recessionary Road was introduced, this was why TBM set out on the trip in the first place. We wanted to examine the small stuff so we could better appreciate the whole.