For reference: this is only 8 days after the $7.4 trillion estimate and only 14 days after the $4.284 trillion estimate. That’s $4,216,000,000,000 in two weeks.

If you really want a fright, keep reading. If we were to keep spending at this rate through the first 100 days of the Obama presidency (149 days from now), the tab for the crisis would hit a whopping $53,370,285,714,285. That’s about 4 times GDP, 4 times the national debt prior to the crisis, and 21 times what the federal government receives in taxes each year. That would only be, oh, about $177,901 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Chump change.

There are many events not listed in that slide show, of course. Two of the most notable: the Civil War ($60.4 billion in 2008 dollars, for both sides) and World War I ($253 billion in 2008 dollars).

For comparison, $4.28 trillion is approximately 31% of 2007 US GDP. It’s also 167% of 2007 federal tax revenues. How’s that for deficit spending?

You may bring your eyebrows back to earth now.

* Some of this money is in the form of loans. Many of these loans are to companies hemorrhaging cash faster than they can borrow it and are explicitly designed as relief against bad assets, however, and the crisis is hardly over. So, counting this money as lost is only wise.

(h/t Greg Mankiw).

In fact, the Founding Fathers designed our Constitution so as to make it very difficult to bring about significant changes. New legislation requires majorities in both houses of Congress followed by a presidential signature. Constitutional amendments are even more difficult — the easiest method is for an amendment to pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds majorities and then be ratified by three-fourths of all state legislatures. This suggests the Founding Fathers were suspicious of quick and easy change.

The actual genius of America, and what makes our country unique, is precisely the opposite of change. It is that our country was founded on certain timeless principles, laid out in the Declaration of Independence and put into practice by the Constitution. These principles include the conviction that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and to provide freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and equal protection under the law.

and especially:

Our constitutional structure recognizes the value of stability, and that change can be (indeed, often is) more damaging than uplifting. It acknowledges that existing social structures and traditions are not merely vestiges of an ignorant past, but rather reflect the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors and the evolutionary fruits of centuries of social experimentation. It respects the organic nature of political communities, with their interdependent parts woven together in a web of complexity that confounds even the most well-laid plans of radical social engineers.