I suspect that if you did a study on older videogame players (between the age of 25 and 50) you would find that they tended to be fiscally conservative libertarians. During the Bush years there were endless topics (on most gaming forums) about the expansion of government and the out of control deficits; and the thing that surprises me personally is how many people who I agreed with about the problems with Bush who don’t seem to think those are issues with Obama.

you don't know any of this.  It's all supposition, so you can't treat it as fact.  You know it is, as you're writing in the conditional.

"You are facing the first dip... and then a dip that could end up being just as bad as the first."

Ot it could be much less.  Or it could not happen.  We don't KNOW the extent of any, but we it's a decent guess, just as the decent guess of the experts were that we couldn't let the potential big drop happen.

And we treat cancer that way all the time successfully by the way.  You remove the tumor and then use radiation or chemo to try and rid the other cells.  But if you don't remove the tumor first, the chemo or radiation won't have time to work.  So thanks for the analogy that helps my point. You're right. It is a good one.

I'm not sure where it said anywhere in the bills that to bail someone out once ensures you will be bailed out again later.  I agree they need more reform in the meantime, but that's unpassable with the way our political system i set up and with the influence the banks and corporations have over the money in the system.  But I'm not sure what that has to do with whether or not to allow a complete system collapse in the meantime.

People blow things out of such proportion that it gets torn apart and spread throughout the media in the worst ways. 

So what if it costs more than the war? It was money spent solely on our country in an effort to prevent further job losses and stimulate the housing market... with additional money for medicinal research, battery research and other technological advancements.

It wasn't money blown on a war so we can send thousands of people to their deaths without a noticeable significant outcome. For all I care, if its money thats going towards our country and not 3 trillion that he's borrowing to send off to China, I really don't care... and neither should you.

It was money blown to keep business alive that should have sank. Why does GM/Chrysler get to stay afloat when they couldn't run their business right? Ford seemed to be doing fine with out governement help. Why do banks that lent money to people they shouldn't have stay in business? So they can repeat what they did and get rewared? If these companies had failed better instutions would have taken their places. Instead we threw moeny at a problem hoping it would fix it. Everything I read in the paper says things are not looking great. Consumer have no confidence as no one knows if they will have a job in 6 months to a year. The houseing market that was recovery (due to the government helping home buyers) seems to be receding again ( at least in my area southern CA). We should care because its our money being spent in frivilous ways, do you care to send me a check so I can buy a ps3? I would greatly apreciate it :)

Ok without checking whether the statistics actually hold up or not (so assuming he is correct) he misses two important points I believe.

1) The stimulus helped the economy recover, therefore the costs of the stimulus are at least to some point offset by the stronger economy.

2) The stimulus spending wasn't a straight up loss. The GM deal is a good example of this, $50B outlay and now the govt owns about $100B of GM.

Dammit. I go without internet for two days and the thread blows up =P

Ok, the reason why I believe that in some cases the stimulus was healthy was because it pushed companies to the edge of bankruptcy without letting them actually topple. This forced them to slim down and actually become strong companies again, the best example of this is GM.

Ideally a recession should trim the fat off of companies, strong companies should weather it without government help (as Ford did) but with government help weaker companies can come out strong.

There is no question that without government help companies such as GM would have failed - would that have left the US economy in a better state than it is now? While an argument could be made that it would allow new stronger companies to come through I personally don't believe it would have done much other than left more people unemployed and the US with fewer exports.

In some cases the stimulus wasn't as such healthy as necessary. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are possibly the only examples of this. The god-awful overblown companies that are too big to fail. If those two went under at that time there is simply no denying that the US economy would be in the shit even more at the moment.

Why does GM/Chrysler have to stay afloat? 2 million jobs is why. First the factories close, then the people that create the specific parts lose their jobs, tire companies lose money, glass companies, paint companies, upholstery companies, then people with money invested in those companies lose money and start to go bankrupt. It would be a downward spiral that would equal the scale of the housing collapse. You think "Oh they didn't deserve it anyway, let them fall". Sorry, but working in the automotive industry taught me something..... EVERYONE depends on these companies. Car magazines get most of their advertisement money from GM paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to put a Silverado on the back cover. You have to look outside of the box and stop listening to everything the media tells you. They forget to include things that might allow you to think differently than they want you to.

Ford and other companies that were doing business right would have stepped in and picked up the slack. If the demand is still there for a product someone will fill it, it just won't be a company that can't keep up with the compition. The same can be said for the banks, and on top that the banks basically got rewared for blundering around with people money. There should be accountibility for their actions, and it shouldn't be in the form of rewards. We are in a downward spiral of forcing out compition in america and thats what needs to stop.

Why do banks get to stay in business? The banks they bailed out were the top banks in the country. What happens if all of our large banks collapse? Can you say yet another downward spiral?

People think that just because the economy didn't 'perk right up' after the large stimulus that it was a failure. If no money had been lent for corporate bailouts.... then you would have seen what a failure truely looked like. Stop reading the paper. Start researching. No, things don't look good. I have to go through yet another couple years of college to earn another degree because the company I work for is closing. That doesn't mean I'm going to grab a pitch fork and start blaming the government, because I KNOW BETTER. You're trapped in the box and can't see anything but what people throw in to show you. LOOK AROUND. 

I am doing fine in this economy, I am not worried for myself. I am not grabbing pitchforks, I have felt the government was far overspending before the collapse, I am all for fiscal responsibilty. I also see that trying to spend our way out of this mess is not working, everything is pointing to another down turn in the economy. I am looking around, I see unemployment getting worse, and people spending less. What do you see?

I have to disagree. Government bailouts of big companies is not capitalism. It reeks more of socialism with fascist tendencies.

If a company cannot survive without tax payer dollars, then it should fail because it is failing to put out a product consumers will buy. The consumers voted with their wallet, while Government said, "Oh noes you have 2 million union employees, we Democrats don't want to lose your union votes, so we will bail you out because we don't want to lose an election!"

All of these epitomize "too big to fail:"

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, and Chrysler were bailed out because the employees of those companies can be counted on to vote Democrat. The blue collar union boys especially, but it gets a little bit murkier with the quasi public/private corporations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

AIG on the other hand is another beast. If the US Government let AIG fail, then it would have wreaked absolute HELL on the international banking system. AIG in many cases was as big if not bigger in Europe than in the US. AIG had to be bailed out to save globalization.

If AIG failed, you would see conservative Democrats like myself saying, "I told ya so! Globalization is nothing but cheaper goods at Wal-Mart and a year round produce department at Safeway, while the American worker sees his/her living wage blue collar/white collar/manufacturing job exported to third world countries such as China, India, the Philippines, and on. Now that AIG has failed, lets bring those jobs back home."

Then again, this never happened as all were bailed out, while the US housing market continues to see record lows and an intolerable unemployment rate of 10%.