In 2010, "quantitative easing" meant plowing a whole lot of money into various financial assets, which is a very different kettle of fish from giving people cash handouts.
Similarly, giving people cash handouts is not necessarily inflationary either (it happens all the time anyway, food stamps, unemployment benefits) because cash handouts don't necessarily increase the money supply. The issue is that transmission appears to have changed in a very subtle way (this isn't just occurring in the US either) where you have fiscal policy seeming to leak through to the money supply (something that a significant proportion of politicians think is impossible atm).