Well, it was $79.7B to be exact. And what the US government did with that was not cut checks, but rather, purchased stock in the companies.

When it sold the stock it bought from manufacturers, it sold for around $70B. When they sold the approximately $2.4B invested into Ally (an auto financing firm), it sold for $17.2B.

So the money spent in 2008 actually made a profit. It was not distributed to the manufacturers or finance companies at all. Just used to shore up their value to prevent them from going out of business – and more importantly, probably, make sure investors didn't lose money, or at least not too much.