It was a bump because it did not last, and in fact we then went the other direction. Debt is a real problem, but debt is a problem that is not today and that growth reduces. Further, not spending on infrastructure projects is a false savings, since spending does have to happen on those. The smart thing is bust out roadwork and the like when the economy is doing poorly, then you can spend less when the economy is full burn and pay off that money spent. GDP for 2011 was ~15 trillion. 1 % growth is therefore about 150 billion. You can see that it won't take terribly long to pay off the infrastructure work done during recessions/downturns. To give you an idea, while the stimulus was in effect, GDP growth was about 1 % higher than it is now, which suggests that the stimulus accounted for about 150 billion in growth(very very roughly). That 150 billion gets tacked onto to this year as well(since without that growth GDP would be 150 billion lower, so in 2 years, we have gained 300 billion in GDP from that stimulus(vast oversimplification to illustrate the point.
The idea is to get through recessions fast, get the economy burning again, then pay for it. What happened instead is that the get the economy burning got sidetracked by a congress that all of a sudden was worried about spending that they never cared before(a cynical person would suggest this was for political reasons, with further evidence by those same people's reaction to the automatic spending cuts). The other thing to remember is that the US is not going to go broke today, tomorrow, next year, or even next decade unless something catastrophic happens outside of what we can predict. We do have to fix the debt. When the economy is good, you pay off the spending from when the economy us bad. We also have to understand that a problem 50 + years in the making is not going to be solved overnight, nor does it have to be. If spending grows slower than the economy, then the problem will, slowly but surely, go away. If you slowly cut spending while the economy is good, that speeds things along.