Obama's "Making Work Pay" program doled out $400 a year for single filers and $800 a year for joint filers. It came and it went.

From Obama's December 17th speech of last year:

^This bipartisan effort was prompted by the fact that tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase on January 1st. If that had come to pass, the average middle-class family would have had to pay an extra $3,000 in taxes next year. That wouldn’t have just been a blow to them - it would have been a blow to our economy just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession.^

$3,000 a year. Almost four times the annual benefit of Obama's temporary rebates. That's the tax cut Bush gave those families for almost a decade. The same real across-the-board tax cuts Democrats hated, and the Republicans wanted to make permanent.

One can be forgiven for assuming that Obama signing the Bush tax cut extension would be more of a real accomplishment than the other one.