Obama really missed an opportunity with the stimulus package. What did he do wrong? He actually tried engage with the GOP's nonsense about the importance of tax cuts. Westneat tells it like it is:

All that spending [$800 billion] hasn't gotten many back to work. Take the freshest data for Seattle and King County. In the first three months of 2010, the act is credited with paying for 2,712 jobs here. That's in a county with a labor force of 1.1 million and 90,000 more currently jobless.

A few thousand jobs in three months is better than nothing. But it's also not much. It shifts King County's unemployment rate by only two-tenths of a percentage point.

Why hasn't the stimulus stimulated us more? I poked around at the "track the money" website, recovery.gov. That answer is pretty simple: Most of the money isn't going to jobs.

A third of the $800 billion was for tax cuts. A huge mistake, in my view, as it largely gave payroll-tax refunds to people, like me, who already have jobs.