Yesterday Paul Krugman wrote that there are people (who he calls "Very Serious People") that dismisses the austerity/stimulus debate as “simplistic” and that Keynesian concerns are “crude”. He said, "There were people like that during the Great Depression too — dismissing as naive any notion that you could put the unemployed back to work just by spending more."
World War II required massive government spending by the U.S. (aka "stimulus") which not only won the war, but took America out of the Abyss of the Great Depression. It also created the greatest middle-class that the World had ever known at the time.