A better way to spend the stimulus money

from the comments:

A couple earlier commenters have pointed out how the US dominated the world economy after WWII. Imagine if we had spent the recent stimulus on bombing German, Japanese and Chinese factories. It would done a lot more for our relative economic position than cash for clunkers. (Of course it would also have been morally reprehensible and provoked an international backlash.

But after the war we gave them money to rebuild their factories.