Monthly cost for the fun in Iraq? $12.4 billion.

E.J. Dionne writes in the Tuesday Washington Post:

The Street on Welfare

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

Days since Mission Accomplished: 1784

Direct, monthly cost of the Iraq occupation: $12.4 billion

California's percentage of that cost, based on population: $1.45 billion

California's projected budget deficit on a monthly basis: $1.15 billion