With its decision this week to pump another $1 trillion into the financial crisis, the government eliminated any doubt that the country is on a wartime footing in the battle to shore up the economy. The strategy now - and in the coming Obama administration - is essentially the win-at-any-cost approach previously adopted only to wage a major war.
And that means no hesitation in pledging to spend previously almost unimaginable sums of money and running up federal budget deficits on a scale not seen since World War II.
Indeed, analysts warn that the nation's next financial crisis could come from the staggering cost of battling the current one.
Just this week, new initiatives added $600 billion to lower mortgage rates, $200 billion to stimulate consumer loans and nearly $300 billion to steady Citigroup, the giant banking conglomerate. That pushed the total estimated cost of the government's varied and numerous economic rescue initiatives this year to $8.5 trillion - a figure that represents half of the entire economic output of the United States this year.
Nor has the cash register stopped ringing. President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are expected to enact a stimulus package of $500 billion to $700 billion soon after he takes office in January.
The spending already has had a dramatic impact on the federal budget deficit, which soared to a record $455 billion last year and began the 2009 fiscal year with an amazing $237 billion deficit for October alone. Analysts say next year's budget deficit could easily bust a previously unthinkable barrier - $1 trillion.
"I didn't think we'd see that for a long time," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "There's a huge risk of another economic crisis, a debt crisis, once we get on the other side of this one."
But the Bush administration, and the economic team Obama is rapidly assembling like a war Cabinet, is vowing to spend whatever it takes to avoid a Depression and worry about the impact later.
"I don't think that there's any way of denying the fact that my first priority and my first job is to get us on the path of economic recovery, to create 2.5 million jobs, to provide relief to middle-class families," Obama told reporters this week.
"But as soon as the recovery is well under way, then we've got to set up a long-term plan to reduce the structural deficit and make sure that we're not leaving a mountain of debt for the next generation."
