Sometimes your household budget gets screwed up when you encounter some sudden, unexpected costs. You know, like when all of a sudden your sewer line in the front lawn breaks and you suddenly have a $10,000 bills to put in a new line. Or medical expenses. Or an auto accident. Whatever the reason, what do you do going forward? Most of us would take a long, hard look at the household budget and eliminate some unneeded items in order to pay for the big, unexpected expense.

The U.S. is experiencing just such an unexpected expense with the probably unavoidable decision to bail out Wall Street. Has anyone really put 2 and 2 together to figure out how much our government has decided to spend in the last couple of weeks? If you haven't added all the bailout numbers up, they total close to $1 trillion dollars! And some members of Congress that are in the know have opined that this could just be the beginning of the amount ultimately needed to bail out the financial companies that were about to fail because of the bad mortgage loans, thereby stabilizing the financial markets.

How much is that anyway? $1 trillions dollars is...

-- About 30% more than it cost to fund the Iraq War for a year.

-- That's enough to increase the national debt by 10% within just a few days.

-- That's about $3,500 for every single American citizen, all 300 million of us.

-- That's an amount that will increase the amount of the national debt per citizen to about $35,000 each.

So what's our government going to do, faced with this large and unexpected expenditure? Will they cut back other government spending? Will they still decrease taxes, making the deficit problem even worse? What are the candidates for President saying they'll do?

This is a fairly important issue to all of us folks. Somebody ought to be saying something.

By the way, this is one more time that Americans have to spend lots of money to bail out people thruout the rest of the world. Yes, the underlying cause of the problem is a whole lot of mortgage loans made to people in the U.S. who couldn't afford them. But the threat to the world financial system was the result of investors and investment bankers thruout the world using the underlying mortgage-backed securities to design all sorts of complex and arcane derivative financial instruments and transactions that would unwind if the firms holding the underlying securities, or insuring them in the case of Freddie, Fannie and AIG, to fail and default on their counerparty responsibilities. I guarantee that many, many of the investors, firms and financial advisors that will benefit from the bailouts agreed to by the U.S. are not Americans!

Looks like the "rich guys" are saving everyone else's bacon yet one more time. When will it end?