Obama's stimulus road to nowhere

Mired in excruciating negotiations over the budget and the debt ceiling, President Obama might reflect that things didn’t have to turn out this way. The impasse grows mainly out of one major decision he made early on: pushing through a giant stimulus. When he took office in January 2009, this was his first priority. The following month, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with a price tag eventually put at $862 billion.

It was, he said at the time, the most sweeping “economic recovery package in our history,” and would “create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years.”