Who is paying for these bailouts? Is anyone giving a good, coherent explanation of who is paying these boggling amounts of money for all of these US government bailouts of failing financial institutions?

"The taxpayer" is a convent cipher, but the tax payers of this household can't afford this. And we are what's usually referred to as "upper-middle class".

The AIG bailout was just the beginning. I have seen estimates that set the total bailout necessary to save us from this financial mess at between one and two trillion dollars. That comes to about $6,500 per person or about $26,000 for a family of four. (And aren't we already on the hook for about $32,000 a head for the national debt?)

"We," being that vast majority of the taxpayers who are not fabulously wealthy, cannot afford this. So who is paying for it?

Really, the only possibility is the rich; those people to whom the Bush administration gave huge tax cuts. It's time to give all that money back and then some. Does the Bush administration have the political guts to tax the rich right now to pay for the economy-saving maneuvers in which it is currently engaged?