Remember when I said there are two economies? That wasn't a tangential point. A recovery for the owners' economy is almost completely unrelated to a recovery for the workers' economy.
So no, recovery does not mean jobs. Jobs means jobs.
The housing credit was a payment to the banks. You can blame whoever you want for passing what they did, but I don't consider that stimulus targeted at helping workers.
Cash for Clunkers might have helped, if they had required that the new cars were American. Or at least built in America.
Both those credits were targeted at specific industries, which is what I keep calling central planning. They were designed to help preserve the status quo.
The tax withholding change, which at least didn't favor a specific industry, was good for an estimated $65/mo for a family -- http://taxes.about.c...ew-tax-credit.htm That's enough to make a big number for the (owners') economy, but won't make a huge difference in most people's lives.
I also notice you didn't include the huge amounts of money sent directly to the banks via TARP and other off-the-books instruments. Even if that money were fully paid back, the round trip from the discount window to the bond market and back meant that huge (and mostly undocumented) amounts of money were shoveled to banks in the form of interest on the money we were loaning them.
But let's suppose every dollar that has been categorized as "stimulus" spending went directly to workers. The "big" number you keep quoting is $1.4 trillion. Considering the crash of the housing bubble represents a $6 trillion hole in the economy, how is that 1.4 supposed to do anything other than slow down the rate of decline?