There is considerable confusion, began by Keynes because of his incomplete theory of animal spirits. Going back to his General Theory, specifically chap 7, we can complete his animal spirit theory and get a better idea of what a stimulus is and is not.
The essence of his theory is that individual savers make decisions without knowledge of the aggregate savings, thus ex ante, the saver expects one return on savings, but ex post, because of aggregate actions, he gets a lower return to savings. The difference is because the savers were animated by spirits that caused collective action unknown to each individually. The concluasion is an unexpected glut of capicity as consumers unknowingly quit consuming in the aggregate,
Savers do not unexpectedly act in synchronization, they are evolutionarily adapted to both save and invest and work in synchronization. The problem of aggregate shifts in savings preceed aggregate worries about unemployment and future goods availability. That is how the economy works. It matches both work and consumption to consumer groups such that the employed producers and targeted consumers match. This process is related to Krugmans agglomeration, there is an expected chain of production that matches consumption, and that structure must be re-aggregated, or re-agglomerated due to significant technology changes.
The Keynesian stimulus, according to the incomplete theory of animal spirits, would have the government act to restore the old agglomeration by deficit spending. The complete theory of animal spirits would have the govenment adapt itself to the new structure of agglomeration, thus removing a constraint to the new equilibrium position.
The key elements of a csuccessful stimulus are 1) A technology shift in production, 2) and monopoly player in the market that unexpectedly capitulates to the new system. My claissic case of a stimulus is the adoption of the industry compatible PC by IBM in 1974.
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