I think you're confusing two very different things any economist who isn't a right wing idiot will tell you the stimulus is working. Many like Paul Krugman argue we need more of it and Democrats this week just approved another 155 billion
The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news — because the same textbook analysis says that the stimulus was far too small given the scale of our economic problems. Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02krugman.htmlThe American Recovery and Reinvestment Act can’t seem to catch a break. When the economy contracted at a 0.7% rate in the quarter after it was first enacted, critics argued that the contraction was evidence that the recovery act didn’t (or even couldn’t) have any effect at all. Never mind that there was wide agreement among economists that, without it the contraction would’ve been three or four times worse.
Now that it has been reported that the economy expanded at a 3.5% rate in the third quarter of this year, some experts quoted by CNN and the New York Times (among others) are suggesting that precisely because the recovery act was responsible for the lion’s share of growth, it somehow had failed to repair the economy’s deep (usually unspecified) underlying structural problems. In short, the recovery-package-led growth in the third quarter was somehow “artificial.”
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/recovery_act_spurs_genuine_growth