Here’s how fiscal stimulus is supposed to work: The federal
government injects a few hundred billion dollars into a sluggish
economy through federal spending. That spending sparks
additional consumer demand. And that additional demand drives
new economic activity that results in a multiplier effect, in
which a dollar of initial government spending creates more than
a dollar of economic activity, spurring economic growth and job
creation.   That was the basic stimulus theory, as explained by
Lawrence Summers, who chairs President Obama’s National Economic
Council, at the tail end of 2008. The story was convincing
enough: In 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—an $830 billion stimulus
package—into law, promising “unprecedented transparency” in
tracking how the money would be used and how many jobs it would
create.    So how did the stimulus work in practice? Daniel
Rothschild, a former researcher at George Mason University’s
Mercatus Center who now works for the Americ