But from what we just saw...Obama's effort in Government spending did not exactly help in creating jobs either. What is Asia doing right that the US is doing wrong? After all that is where it seems the manufacturing jobs are going.
Depends on which part of the stimulus you look at. The energy efficiency credits spurred huge job growth in the respective sector. Furnace factories, appliance factories, and window manufacturers/installers experienced explosive growth.
Cash 4 Clunkers (which I hate for unrelated reasons) probably kept Ford alive without needing further assistance and made the GM and Chrysler bailouts less severe (keeping jobs on all accounts). Toyota benefited, the Corolla and Camry are built in the U.S.. Honda benefited, the Civic is mostly built in the U.S.
GM and Chrysler are now both hiring a lot domestically, GM has moved production of it's small cars from Korea back to the U.S.
I don't know about your area, but in mine we have a LOT of structurally deficient bridges. All of the worst ones have now been rebuilt and they are circling back around to the bridges that had less severe issues. Pennsylvania had a lot of "shovel ready" bridge projects that it simply didn't have money to pay for, so there was a lot of jobs created there.
Have we netted out positive? No.. but without those stimulus projects, we'd be in even worse shape than we are today. There is continuing mounting evidence that the stimulus wasn't big
enough, and that is because of Republican opposition.