I think everything [President] Bush and [President] Obama have done on the economy is getting a needless bad rap. At least that’s everything Bush did after September of the last year he was in office… I knew then it would be costly political vote because I was pissed off, because I detested being in the position we had to help the very people [on Wall Street] who had caused the economy to implode in the first place. We had no choice. If you’ve got an epidemic going on, you’ve got to treat the people who caused the epidemic as well as the people treating it or everyone is going to die.

The public hates it, but it happens to have been a pretty damn good deal for the taxpayers. When all is said and done, that will not have cost the American people nearly as much as we feared. The cost will be less than $100 billion. And if you can save your economy by spending $100 billion, I’d say that’s worth it. Even if to do that you had to give some help to the dumb bastards who got us in trouble in the first place, and you can quote me.