One of the biggest messes in our history was created, doing nothing would have made it worse.
There is no logic in this line of reasoning, as in, "well we had to do something!" Remember reading in history class about a little medical procedure called "leeching"? If someone got sick, a doctor was summoned to attach blood-sucking leeches to the patient. The reasoning was, these are the best experts of our time; we have to do
something; doing nothing would have made it worse!" Actually, the bloodletting procedure killed far more people than would have died if nothing was done.
"One of the biggest messes in history" was created by giving millions of mortgages to those who had no chance of repaying them, thus artificially increasing the value of everyone's real estate. That value never truly existed, because there was no real money backing those mortgages. When homeowners "cashed out" during the bubble using the fake inflated values, hundreds of billions of dollars entered and built up the economy. But when the scam unravelled, all the fake value disappeared. The appropriate thing to do in that situation would have been to
let the economy fall back to where it should have been. Trying to restimulate the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars
that also don't exist (it's just printed money) is just inviting the situation to repeat.
To say "we needed to do something" is also clearly disproven, because only about 4% of the stimulus money has even hit the economy yet, although the economy is starting to stabilize on it's own. What will happen when the other 96% of the $787 billion hits the economy? It's like if you were playing monopoly and after you get going, you decided to throw in all the cash from a spare monopoly game. Since the amount of property didn't change, the cost of everything on the board would immediately get bid up to twice it's original cost. It's called hyperinflation and it's what we can look forward to. Only, the Federal Reserve has the power to (and will) jack up interest rates through the roof to cause an artificial recession when this happens, thus keeping inflation under control. What you're left with will be "stagflation" (astronomical interest rates, moderate inflation, zero economic growth, and extreme unemployment). The same idiots who caused our economic mess will be making it far worse. Whereas, if the government had never "done something" just to say they did something, we actually might have had a chance at real recovery.
This stuff is not rocket science, guys.