Where "stimulus" went

The typical argument against fiscal expansion to fight the economic downturn has been that "we tried it and it didn't work".  As Paul Krugman points out, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (a technical analysis bureau) looks at where the money actually went.

BEA Analysis

The way it can be interpreted is like this: the peak quarter of stimulus was the first quarter of 2010 (a shade under $90 billion).  Of that, a little under $40 billion was tax cuts and credits, about $17 billion was safety net programs (unemployment insurance and food stamps), a little over $25 billion was aid to states to counteract cuts that they would have made due to the downturn (since states have laws requiring them to keep balanced budgets and the federal government doesn't), and about $8 billion was everything else (i.e. new government spending).  So at the stimulus's PEAK it was putting an annualized $35 billion or so into the economy.  At a GDP of roughly $14 trillion, that's... a quarter of 1 percent of GDP.  Which translates to an eighth of a percent off the unemployment rate.  In other words, stimulus didn't "fail".  Simply put, the expansion was non-existent compared to the size of the problem.  Even if you call tax cuts and tax credits stimulus (they're inefficient, but it's a viable argument), at the stimulus's PEAK, that's still about 1% of GDP in stimulus (for an output gap that was about 10 percent of GDP).

To put it by analogy, the anti-stimulus crowd is complaining that throwing one square foot of dirt into a 10 square foot hole didn't fill up the hole.