astronomical

Even I didn’t think Bush was capable of getting us this far into debt:

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury announced $800 billion in new lending programs on Tuesday, sending a message that they will print as much money as needed to revive the crippled banking system.

Can you say “Wiemar Republic”?

The two new efforts — one mainly to finance loans for consumers, and an even bigger one to push down home mortgage rates — marked the latest but hardly the last of the federal government’s efforts to shoulder the losses that began with subprime mortgages and have spread throughout the economy.

All told, the government has assumed at least $7 trillion in direct and indirect financial obligations in the form of Wall Street bailouts, emergency lending and government guarantees on bank deposits, inter-bank loans and home mortgages.
…
It was the first time that the Fed and the Treasury have stepped into finance consumer debt, from car loans and student loans to small business loans.

So the U.S. is going further in to debt in order to loosen up credit so that the maxed-out consumer can take on even more?

Would you please just cut the shit and start building things? This is a zero-sum game. If we do not start doing something concrete with this money, instead of shifting paper from hole to hole, the total volume of the hole will never disappear and we will still have 11 million unemployed and no consumer demand to get people back to work and start taxes flowing back into the Treasury.

Bush isn’t a lame duck – he’s a black hole.