Somehow I missed the BEA’s very useful page tracking the Recovery Act and how it is translated into taxes and spending. (Thanks to the commenter who mentioned it). It’s especially useful for thinking about what the Obama stimulus really involved — and what it didn’t.

Look at the peak quarter of stimulus (pdf), which was the first quarter of 2010. I’m going to rearrange the categories a bit. Here’s how I read it: at annual rates (in other words, actual numbers in the quarter were only 1/4 as large), the total budget impact was $357 billion. Of that, we had:

Tax cuts and refundable tax credits: $151 billion

Aid to individuals (mainly unemployment insurance and food stamps): $70 billion

Aid to state and local governments: $103 billion

Everything else: $33 billion

Note that the aid to individuals was basically safety net, and the aid to state and local was about mitigating spending cuts rather than spending expansion. Basically, this was at best an attempt to beef up automatic stabilizers.

So much for “we tried Keynesian policies and they didn’t work.”