too obvious

So the government is about to pass some multi-billion (moving towards “trillion” with every passing minute) dollar “stimulus plan” to try and “stimulate” the American economy. Basically, they are going to take some of the money the government has (or says it has), and dump it into various pork-barrel projects, pet projects, and countless other programs, all in the hopes of helping the economy out a little.
Now, I might have missed something, but pretty much all of the money the American government has comes from the American citizens, their businesses, their bank accounts, their investments, their productivity, their goods and services, their sweat and labor. In effect, almost all of the money the American government possesses came from the American economy, so all the government is doing with this magical “stimulus plan” is giving back a fraction of what it has taken over time.
Would it not have been simpler, more efficient, and more effective to simply cut out the middleman, and let the American economy keep more of its own money to distribute as it sees fit? Or am I missing some carefully-concealed nuance of how taking money out of the economy and then distributing some of it back to specific, hand-chosen organizations makes the situation somehow better? Well, some nuance apart from the idiotic liberal belief that government control always makes anything better.