We just didn't spend enough...

A few quarters ago I took a history class from a very knowledgeable professor who was also, by his own admission, very liberal. Despite his political bias, even he admitted that The New Deal did not pull America out of the Great Depression. Instead, he explained to a class full of FDR-worshipping liberal students, WWII did the job. But he made sure to add one caveat: the New Deal only failed because it didn't spend enough, because FDR didn't transfer enough people onto welfare, and that government didn't grow enough.

This seems to be the liberal arguement every time big tax-and-spend (or should I say spend-then-tax) liberal plans fail. They didn't fail because the strategy is flawed, it failed because we didn't do it big enough. Paul Krugman's column today in the NYT makes just that argument. He claims that the stimulus plan was too small (even though we haven't even spent 10% of the money yet) and that Obama needs to tell the American people that it's time for another round.

Can anyone give me an example of when government decided to spend a whole lot of money and create a whole bunch of new agencies to stop economic bleeding and it worked?