Stimulus a Bust ?

I'm not an economist by any means.  Having said that, I've often wondered about the sanity of spending bunches of citizens money on any kind of government program intended to stimulate the economy.  Seems to me that the government serves us best by staying out of anything having to do with economics.  For instance, the recent collapse was started by the government trying to help by pushing artificially cheap mortgages on those that can't afford them, then the financial institutions had to play games to cover their butts.

John Lott has a graph that shows our past stimulus had only a temporary effect on unemployment.  Seems to me that we'd all be better off if the stimulus never happened.  If so we probably would've recovered from the bottom by now.