You misunderstand. I was speaking metaphorically about the situation in Iraq, not about the American economy.
I don't say much about specific items in the economy because I realize I don't know enough and am probably not smart enough to understand things like why the economy crashed in the final year of Bush the Younger. Instead, when voting, I look at the things I believe I do understand - that certain rules always win out in the long run. Supply and Demand, there's no free lunch, tragedy of the commons, etc..
I believe deficit stimulus spending is like an addictive drug. It creates a temporary high but the crash that follows leaves us worse off than before, which causes the government to use more stimulus with each attempt requiring more money but achieving less effect. The Bush/Obama stimulus may have prevented a depression but it didn't create a recovery. What does seem to have create a slow recovery - like an addict who starts giving up a drug faces - is the sequester.
It's not that deficit spending can't be good. When used to build a road or a port to allow increased economic activity it can be very good. But it can also be used to build an unneeded road or port and simply be a waste of money. It is the thing that gets built that matters, not the fact that the government is the one spending the money. If the money is going to be poorly spent by the government it would be better not to spend it at all than to spend it simply for the sake of stimulus.
Why? Because every time the government spends money, whether borrowed or not, it sucks money from the rest of the economy and prevents growth of other economic activity. The government hired 50 programmers to build a pretty website that does nothing? Some would call it a stimulus; I would call it 50 programmers who aren't available to build a app to make a factory more efficient.