It would have been easy to solve the economic crisis

Let us, for a moment, be very naive and idealistic and imagine a USA that was governed by politicians who actually wanted the best for the people and the country, rather than themselves and their buddies. What they could have done to solve the economic crisis of 2008 much better than the actual US government did, is this:

They could have rounded up everyone involved in the making of the crisis, and told them: we know you caused the crisis, and you know you caused the crisis, but we both know that what you did was technically not against the law, so we can't legally put you in prison for making millions of people into beggars. Therefore, we are giving you this choice: a) you hand over 90% of your and your family members' assets and we'll let you go; b) we'll use one thousandth of the proposed bailout money to hire the best detectives to rip your professional and private lives apart, starting from the richer and going down to the poorer, and for every, even the tiniest, misdeed you ever did, we are going to charge you with the severest crime we can, ask for the harshest punishment the law permits, and sue you for the biggest amount of damages we can.

I think most crooks involved in the real estate bubble would have had enough skeletons in their closets to eagerly give up the overwhelming part of their wealth (and still keep far more than any person can spend in his lifetime). The nation would have recovered many billions of dollars, maybe not enough to cover all the damage, but the psychological impact to the common people would have been huge.

Then it would have been easy to say to the people: see, we made the crooks pay and recovered so-and-so-much of the damage. However, we are going to use the money to help the people who are really in a desperate situation, like the ones who have no roof over their heads. We are not going to hand over taxpayers' money to those who merely lost the profits they were expecting on their speculations. And all those cry-babies who believed they were entitled to living in luxury on borrowed money forever, shut the fuck up and learn this new way of life: consume only as much as you have earned with your work.