By the early-trading's light

So it looks like there's finally a bipartisan agreement, reached just in time before our Masters began early trading in the Asian markets, but, fingers crossed, it still has to get voted on.

A part of me still wants the deal to fall through, but not to feed my schadenfreude. I'm not the only one. Kos has been railing about the lack of transparency in the plan, and underhandedly praising Republican roadblocks. Here's the latest:

The congressional leadership has some sort of deal, 110 pages long (or so), that people are supposed to digest and vote on tomorrow. Whatever the details of the bill might be, the fact that the leadership of both parties have refused to take a breath and explore alternate and less costly (to the taxpayers) options is a disgrace. The only question is whether the rank and file will vote for this thing, and given that the voters aren't happy, we'll see what happens.

And it's always nice to see The Editors on one's side:

Yes, their reasoning was cynical at best; yes, they eventually moved from Devil’s Advocates to Satan’s Assholes; and, yes, there was always the suspicion - since confirmed a few billion times over - that, were they actually put in charge of things, they’d fuck it all up just for the hell of it. But, while annoying, there can be a certain value to being the asshole who responds with a dismissive “O RLY?” to everything you say. I generally valuate this in inverse proportion to my ability to understand the assertion being made; in the case of throwing $700 billion dollars at some kind of fancy Wall Street clusterfuck, for example, I actually value it pretty highly.

It looks like one of my biggest concerns might actually becontemplated in the bail-out plan:

The final version of the bill included a deal-sealing plan for eventually recouping losses; if the Treasury program to purchase and resell troubled mortgage-backed securities has lost money after five years, the president must submit a plan to Congress to recover those losses from the financial industry. Presumably that plan would involve new fees or taxes, perhaps on securities transactions.

Today's NYT had the following nice graphics on the national debt and the bailouts, and they stated it stood at $5 Trillion. On the one hand, that's half what I thought, but on the other that means the debt would be growing by 20%, not a measely 10%. Really, I will not be satisfied until the national debt is in a snug lock-box so it can't grow another penny.