In the research that I have come across, it seems that the only offered alternative to the stimulus was tightening up the national belt and riding out the economic chaos to avoid the long run costs of rescue. That would essentially be the government saying, "I could throw you this lifeline, but then we'll have to fix the line in the future and we're both going to drift ashore anyway." This type of inaction, or worse, policies that worsened the short run economy at the sake of sparing long run economic gain, are exactly what Keynes himself was adamantly against. "In the long run, we're all dead," he said.
Educated professionals, incidentally, were most vocal in their dislike of the rescue plan for the current recession. Ironically this group denied that there even was a recession for the longest time because it is a group most insulated from the effects of the recession. The arguements against the rescue plan from the side of the working class have taken a new socio-political rhetoric; namely, that such a government takeover is a step toward Socialism. This is quite unfortunate, since this group is most rescued by the plan and also the group least individually responsible for paying for it.
The working class group is also most helped by the bailout of the financial institutions, since that group was more likely to have a sub-prime mortgage or go into default to begin with. Without government or any other action, loss of investment capital would quickly have shrunk the GDP and the standard of living for the working class group would have decreased dramatically. The invisible hand would have kicked in to set things in motion again eventually, and the advantage would have been economic growth without the offset of paying for the economic rescue. So it is true that we are making things significantly worse for future generations by handing them a huge deficit that we made that their taxes and investments will have to go toward paying back instead of just going directly to pay for all their current government expenses. This would not, however, erase some of the severe social problems that come with the level of poverty that we'd be facing without the rescue plan, such as homlessness, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, hunger, drug dealing, and theft. These issues go beyond social in that they are costly to society in terms of money: costs of police interventions, jail, property loss, even lowering home values. Many are spared this hardship because of the rescue plan, and future generations should be grateful for that.
