The above is the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimate for Obama's budget in the context of the recent past. There is no denying that it is a bloodbath of red ink. The tragedy is that the Bush administration didn't nip the problem in the bud back in 2007 when the cost would probably have been one-fifth the size (remember, Ben Bernanke assured everybodey that it was "contained" to the sub-prime market in early 2007 and that was only a few hundred billion dollars, not trillions).
If you look not at dollars, but at GDP percentage, it doesn't look as bad. It is a lot of money, but the other option -- falling into a Great Depression -- is so very, very bad that only ideologues like the Republicans are willing to argue that the costs should be foregone in favour of a complete crash in the economy. Reagan was a happy warrior who ran up a 5.6% deficit and Republicans cheered him on. He did that during a vanilla recession, not a recession threatening to become a depression.
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