The Obama administration began to prepare the ground for another stimulus package last week, amid countless signs that the first one isn't working.

While the president's favorite partisan economists held hands and chanted in unison from the Keynesian prayer book, Warren Buffett captured the mood of the American people when he said that the first stimulus package "was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and then having also a bunch of candy mixed in."

The simple arithmetic of the February stimulus suggests that Buffett got it wrong. It wasn't half a tablet of Viagra with candy; it was a tiny dose of a mysterious herbal remedy, with a stick of sugarless gum.

The so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allotted $787 billion, divided into two main parts. The lion's share, about $499 billion, was devoted to Keynesian-style government spending measures. The remaining $288 billion took the form of tax relief.

The academic literature says definitively that higher government spending will provide at least a modest economic stimulus. Critics of the idea that government spending can provide a valuable countercyclical boost point mostly to the fact that it takes a long time for such spending to take off.

So if the government-spending side of President Barack Obama's stimulus isn't working yet, it must be because the spending hasn't happened. The numbers bear that out.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, self- described as the "watchdog for the American public on the use of Recovery Act," tracks the status of stimulus efforts and publishes its results on the Web site recovery.gov.

Measly Spending

According to the latest data on the spending side, $174 billion has been "made available" and about $60 billion has been "spent."

Of the $60 billion, roughly $13 billion was simply mailed to seniors by the Social Security Administration as a one-time payment. That money should really be thought of as being similar to tax relief, which we will discuss in a moment. Another $40.5 billion went to the Department of Health and Human Services, which mainly provides grants to state governments, which themselves have trouble spending money in a timely fashion.

That leaves a measly $7 billion in funds that best meet the definition of emergency stimulus. It is impossible that such a small amount of spending had any effect on the economy.

On the tax-relief side, the biggest component is the Making Work Pay credit. It provides $400 to individuals and $800 to families by reducing the withholding amount in workers' paychecks. The Internal Revenue Service adjusted withholding tables in late February and required companies to enact the change by April 1.

Spike in Savings

Keynesians hope that such payments will stimulate consumption. Critics dating back to Milton Friedman argue that individuals will save rather than consume much of the money. The data are now in, and a clear spike in savings occurred just as the stimulus checks began arriving. The spike is larger than even the most pessimistic economist might have expected.

According to the most recent Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, personal saving reached 6.9 percent of disposable personal income in May, up from 5.6 percent in April and between 4.1 and 4.6 percent during the year's first quarter.

Let's compare the amount of money in the stimulus checks to the amount of new savings.

The BEA estimates that the Making Work Pay credit lowered total individual taxes $933 million in March and $4.15 billion in both April and May. Also in May, the Economic Recovery Payment program provided those one-time benefit increases of $250 to Social Security and Railroad Retirement beneficiaries, and to disabled veterans, raising the monthly total to $17.28 billion.

Save or Spend

Putting it all together, the stimulus raised total personal income by about $22 billion from March through May.

Over this same period, the BEA estimates personal saving increased by $1.94 billion in March, $12.18 billion in April, and $13.36 billion in May, for a total of about $27 billion. In other words, the spike in savings was bigger than the stimulus. It might be that almost all of the stimulus money was saved.

So the stimulus bill had two parts, and neither has succeeded. The government-spending part has yet to occur, and the individual-tax part appears to have been saved. That's a big reason why the economy still stinks.

Fixing the economy may well be necessary and may well require policy changes. But another stimulus plan like the last one would be a recipe only for a bigger deficit. Given how little of the medicine has made it to the patient, it is appalling that anyone might have the temerity to call for more of the same.

Kevin A. Hassett is a senior fellow and director of the economic policy studies at AEI.