Needless to say, this sort of thing didn’t work in the past to restart the economy or to seriously reduce unemployment when $800 billion was okayed for stimulating the economy back in 2009. A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University suggests some reasons why. Authors Garrett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild surveyed 1,300 managers and workers at firms receiving money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the official name of Obama’s stimulus) and found that firms hired more people who already had jobs (47 percent) than people who were unemployed when they were hired (42 percent). The Mercatus study, touted as “the first of its kind” in surveying the effects of how such funds are actually used by employers, has its limitations for sure. But it drives home a disheartening reality about government’s role in the economy: There’s no on-off switch that Obama or anybody else can flip in the right direction.

The starting point of any serious discussion about jobs, jobs, jobs should be the brutal fact that government, regardless of who is running it, cannot create positions apart from public-sector jobs. And those in most cases are zombie jobs that can only survive on infusions of fresh cash taken elsewhere from the economy via taxes. That’s why state and local payrolls are being cut as federal stimulus dollars dry up.

Which isn’t to say that government can’t help foster an environment that makes it easier for self-sustaining jobs to be created. Indeed, that’s the one thing government can and should do: Create a reliable and stable fiscal and regulatory framework that businessess can rely on. What might go into creating such an atmosphere? Precisely the sort of things that Obama and congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans, have ignored over the past several years in the rush to embrace all manner of bailout economics. What’s needed is a sense of stability to the general fiscal landscape that might help to contain the “known unknowns,” such as federal spending levels, debt creation, market interventions, and tax rates.