The government is a very inefficient spender of money. Always has been, always will be. Somethings are appropriate for the government to handle -- efficiency or not -- and other things are best left free of the government.
The basic idea of the stimulus was Keynsian economics. Government has levers and dials that it can manipulate, so goes the theory, to coerce the economy to go where the economy ought to go. One lever is the interest rate maintained by the federal reserve board. Another lever -- or is it a dial? -- is the spending the government undertakes. Now no one disagrees that the government throwing money out into the economy puts money into people's pockets. Of course, the football player who threw dollar bills into the air in a Las Vegas night club put money in people's pockets too. But there is more to Keynsian economics. Keynsian economics proposes that such money injected into the economy acts like a small slug of water priming a pump in a water well. The returned flow is much greater than the injection. But for this to work some precision and insight is needed to target the injection carefully. There was not any precision targeting associated with the stimulus package thrown out by the Democrats in 2009.
Now the above is a faithful rendering of Keynsian economic theory -- targeted government spending can coerce the economy towards growth. That is a theory. Not every one agrees with that theory any longer. It is my view that less than 50% of economists agree with Keynsian economic theory. But even if you accept Keynsian theory . . . the stimulus needs to be TARGETED!!! It wasn't. It was rather used to pay off political supporters in many cases.
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$490,000 Stimulus grant creates 1.72 jobs
