Government Bailouts

If the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout passes, we will have spent about 7% of our 2008 GDP on bailouts. Everyone is talking about this new bailout proposal, but with those already done the government will have spent over a $1 trillion on bailouts this year. This site has an interesting graph showing the various bailouts since 1970 (in 2008 dollars). It sounds like both Democrats and Republicans believe that some sort of intervention is necessary, although it is not yet clear to me whether the government's purchase of nearly worthless pieces of paper to "restore confidence" will prevent major economic collapse. It is also not yet clear to me how much time we have before a collapse is imminent, and for that matter, what the realistic effects of such a major recession will be. Many are comparing what is going on now to the Great Depression. Could we really see unemployment hit 25%? How difficult will it be for people to borrow money if there is no intervention?
I would really love to hear quantified predictions rather than simply that the economy is at serious risk (and that we need to do this as soon as possible), as Bush told us last night. I would also like to see what the cost of spending $700 billion (as well as the total $1.01 trillion) on bailouts will have on the value of our currency and other economic indicators.

So right now I think I have to be agnostic on the of issue bailouts. Even after reading newspaper articles and watching the news, it is still not clear to me what the relevant cost-benefit analysis looks like. I should also mention that in addition to impact estimates, I would like to see some sort of measure of the accuracy of these estimates based on either previous forecasts or a model of the uncertainty of these effects. After all, what suckers we will all be if we spend an additional $700 billion on bailouts and STILL have economic collapse along the added mess created by spending huge sums of tax dollars on it.