A few recent articles related to government spending on infrastructure projects.
The first is a New York Times article about Japan’s failure to recover from its early 1990s slowdown. The article does not mention the fact that the U.S. government has been doing exactly what the Japanese government did, i.e., spending money on expensive infrastructure projects and on protecting big established companies (like the Detroit automaker bailout).
As an example of where government stimulus money goes, here’s an article on a $500 million project to build a few miles of light rail in Detroit. It seems odd that anyone would want to build additional transportation infrastructure in a city that is depopulating as rapidly as Detroit. One would naively think that the existing road network would be more than ample for a city whose population is about half of what it was when the roads were laid out (source). See also: this video.