Unemployment + Obama's Stimulus Package = Effective?

So Ben has wonderfully explained with pretty graphs how Keynes' theory relates to the recent financial crisis, specifically in the housing market. He talks about deflation, so perhaps I can focus on Keynes' 'Program of Expansion' argument and how effective the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been in uplifting the US economy out of its recession.

First, to outline what Keynes thinks about unemployment. He believes that expanding unemployment programs and dishing out cash to the unemployed is inefficient and a highly unproductive use of our resources: "Since 1921 we have paid out to the unemployed in cash a sum of about 500,000,000 - and have got literally nothing for it." Using this money, Britain could have built houses, roads throughout the country, etc. However, the incalculable loss is "retarding for a decade the economic progress of the whole country." He stresses throughout the reading that a country does not get rich off of people who simply save when they don't spend their income, but by people who use their savings and invest in capital equipment of the country. In his opinion, a "policy of trying to lower the rate of interest by suspending new capital improvements and so stopping up the outlets and purposes of our savings is simply suicidal. This seems to be exactly what the stimulus bill was doing: providing government construction jobs rebuilding infrastructure, the Fed keeping interest rates extremely low so that people are encouraged to borrow and make investments again, etc.

Based on my understanding of the reading, it seems like Keynes would be a fan of Obama's stimulus package. According to the Washington Post, some of the nine best studies that provide data on this topic are generally in favor of the stimulus package and the results it has produced. The Act included direct spending in infrastructure, education, health, and energy, federal tax incentives, and the expansion of unemployment benefits and other social welfare programs as well as several other long-term spending projects. Keynes would probably agree with the additional investment in infrastructure and education as I mentioned above, and not so much the unemployment benefits. But politics is not synonymous with economics, and unemployment benefits/welfare are important to the Democratic platform.

At least in the first study on the page, the research concludes that the different types of spending had varying effects: "Aid to states for education and law enforcement didn’t have a significant effect, but aid to low-income people and infrastructure spending showed very positive impacts. The multiplier was between 1.96 to 2.31 for low-income spending, 1.85 for infrastructure spending, and between 0.47 and 1.06 for the stimulus overall." Overall, though, the stimulus had a positive, statistically significant effect on employment. Although there is a lot of rhetoric in the public space regarding the efficacy of injecting the economy with close to $800 billion, a majority of the most rigorous studies show that in order to prevent our economy from getting into an even larger slump, this was necessary. The main question then is whether this amount or these types of spending were the most effective channels to recovering our economy. That is a question that our reading on Keynes does not answer, but this study's findings might: