"We will need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again" as well as "begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding deficits over the long term."

Where was Bush even mentioned in this thread until you brought him up?

I bring up Bush because his people had the same faulty logic about the "inevitable" swing of the economy. I'm reminded of global warming apologists who claim it is a natural part of earth's system and that we can only enjoy the warm weather. We just deal with the downswing, "stimulate" the economy into an upswing, and hope it lasts. In a healthy economy, the market is stable enough to maintain longer peaks. America's peaks have gotten higher, but so short lived that the extreme wealth is barely distributed. We cannot rely on the systems that are so volatile. I don't know very much about Economics at all, but I still can't see a difference between the two Presidents' logic.

Preventing business cycles

Because the periods of stagnation are painful for many who lose their jobs, pressure arises for politicians to try to smooth out the oscillations. An important goal of all Western nations since the Great Depression has been to limit the dips.
Managing economic policy to even out the cycle is a difficult task in a society with a complex economy, even when Keynesian theory is applied. According to some theorists, notably nineteenth-century advocates of communism, this difficulty is insurmountable. Karl Marx in particular claimed that the recurrent business cycle crises of capitalism were inevitable results of the system's operations. In this view, all that the government can do is to change the timing of economic crises. The crisis could also show up in a different form, for example as severe inflation or a steadily increasing government deficit. Worse, by delaying a crisis, government policy is seen as making it more dramatic and thus more painful.
Additionally, Neoclassical economics plays down the ability of Keynesian policies to manage an economy. Challenging the Phillips Curve since the 1960s, economists like Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman or 2006 Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps have made ground in their arguments that inflationary expectations negate the Phillips Curve in the long run. The stagflation of the 70's supported their theory by flying in the face of Keynesian predictions. Friedman has gone so far as to argue, that all the Federal Reserve System can do is to avoid making large mistakes, as he believes they did by contracting the money supply very rapidly in the face of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, in which they made what would have been a recession into a great depression. (Friedman calls the Great Depression the "Great Contraction" because of this).

He's doing exactly the right thing. The catastrophic mistake of the catastrophic crash of 1929 was that governments did absolutely nothing thinking that 'the free market will fix itself'

Where was Bush even mentioned in this thread until you brought him up?

Bush spent 700b to fix the economy.

Obama spent 700b to fix the economy.

He's asking what's different.

Require unprecedented levels of transparency, oversight, and accountability

He's doing exactly the right thing. The catastrophic mistake of the catastrophic crash of 1929 was that governments did absolutely nothing thinking that 'the free market will fix itself'. The free market never fixes itself, it has had regular heart attacks throughout the 20th century and governments have had to invoke a variety of tactics to recussitate it. Tax cuts are a very easy option, but have shown to have had little effect in such a steep recession. These sort of cash injections are precisely what will keep the economy afloat in the short-term. But the long-term will require a drastically different sort of capitalism, with the necessity of nationalising banks and other institutions.

One burst of money in one's account is not going to do a damned thing. If anything, I get an exhaust, turbo/supercharger, or I pay about 2-3 mos of my car off courtesy of the United States.

8 Dollars a week is no more valid than 600 dollars a person, 1400 per household. It costs billions and is based on temporary financial bandaging. Reform of the stupid crediting culture/systems we have in America would be a far more beneficial, long-term fix to the economic problem. Pay back bad mortgages to the individuals who were sold for their credit. Penalize and redistribute careless CEOs who bought bad credit from the individual and sold it to the business sector. Let's sew up the wound so we stop bleeding out every 10 years. There are far more faulty sinkholes of money in American culture that could very quickly be solved by enforcing laws already in the book. We need to fix the leaky economy before trying to pour more money in. People will either save it or spend it on empty, stagnant sectors.

I bring up Bush because his people had the same faulty logic about the "inevitable" swing of the economy. I'm reminded of global warming apologists who claim it is a natural part of earth's system and that we can only enjoy the warm weather. We just deal with the downswing, "stimulate" the economy into an upswing, and hope it lasts. In a healthy economy, the market is stable enough to maintain longer peaks. America's peaks have gotten higher, but so short lived that the extreme wealth is barely distributed. We cannot rely on the systems that are so volatile. I don't know very much about Economics at all, but I still can't see a difference between the two Presidents' logic.

The last time I checked, throwing ridiculous amounts of money at something is about the only thing you people know how to do.

*Runs before he gets lynched*

-Flat Tax
-Federalize the Federal Reserve and remove the interest rates it charges banks for loans (tax payer dollars should move the printing presses, not a private business).
-Remove minimum wage
-Make it illegal for Worker Unions to negotiate wages/benefits (they can only go on strike for improved safety standards if needed...though really this isn't even necessary any more with the safety standards and inspections that exist now as opposed to when worker unions were first formed).

What? We're talking about solving the economic crisis, not turning back to the 1920s.

I love how the first guy to piss and moan and compare Obama to Bush in this thread was an Obama whore when the race started back in the day.