This news item is easily overlooked, and revealing: “Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation’s weak employment picture.”

The month the stimulus passed, February of this year, 6,593,000 Americans were employed in construction; in the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,966,000 Americans were employed in that field. In other words, while all of this stimulus-based construction was going on, the profession lost 627,000 jobs.

Not only did the stimulus fail to create a significant number of jobs in the overall economy, it had little or no impact in the one area that provided that much-hyped slogan: “shovel ready.”