The stimulus was never designed to do much.

The billionaire funded anti stimulus movement in the U.S. is fond of claiming that the original stimulus did not achieve much. Well the answer is that it wasn’t designed to do much, apart from prevent the entire U.S. economy grinding to a halt. It was certainly never designed to bring the U.S. back to full employment in two or three years.

See here, and search for the three or four paras starting:“The most important question facing Obama…”.