I sure felt it. Didn't you?

I'm referring, of course, to that gentle, if not persistent tug at my wallet on Saturday.

Every South County resident, male or female, working or not, certainly should have noticed.

"Don't worry. Stay calm," federal government officials reassured us all in ver calm tones as they rushed to the nearest TV camera or network radio microphone.

It's just Uncle Sam digging a little deeper into your pocket and mine for another $1.3 trillion dollars in what the world media has quickly dubbed the "Mother of all financial bailouts" since the Great Depression, according to the Hindustan Times on Sunday, Sept. 21.

With one stroke of his pen on Saturday, Sept. 21, our President George W. Bush introduced an emergency legislative proposal authorizing U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to buy up to $700 billion in toxic real estate loans, thereby taking ownership of hundreds of thousands, if not hundreds of millions, of bad mortgages during the next two years.

In effect, according to news analyst Peter S. Goodman, writing in the Saturday edition of the New York Times, "the government is dispensing with rescuing one company at a time, and instead is taking on a vast pile of bad debt in one gulp."

In an effort to fast-track approval by Congress, President Bush huddled much of Sunday with congressional leaders to hammer out the plan's specifics. According to Imaeyen Iganga, a reporter for ABC News, this was being done, "in part, because they (Congress) are set to recess this Friday and won't return until after the presidential election."

"The idea," Ibanga explains further, "is that with cleared balance sheets, banks could go back to work and again lend money to individuals for new homes, cars, businesses and college tuitions."

That all sounds well and good, but isn't that what got us all into this financial debacle in the first place?

Following a recent Anderson Chamber of Commerce Greeters gathering, a chatted informally about the events leading up to Saturday's bailout announcement with Darryl Sutterfield, a long-time friend and a respected local banking official.

Greed — the kind best typified by Gordon Gekko, a character played by actor Michael Douglas in the 1987 film "Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone — is what drove many Americans to buy bigger and fancier homes than they could ever hope to afford, Sutterfield had said.

Greed drove the builders to construct those homes as large as possible to jack up the price.

Greed drove lenders to write shakier and shakier loans to borrowers with little or no ability to pay back those loans so that they could buy those palatial McMansions.

And greed drove executives from large financial institutions to scoop up those tenuous mortgages on the bet that housing values would continue to climb by double digits even as other economic indicators were screaming out ear-piercing warnings.

As a result of this bailout, our national debt will rise from $10.6 trillion to $11.3 trillion. These numbers are so huge, they need a bit of perspective.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which maintains a world and U.S. population clock, at the moment I wrote this sentence the world's population was estimated at 6,725,086,325 while the U.S. population was estimated at 305,217,317.

Therefore, the newly-authorized national debt ceiling, under this bailout plan, carries a price tag of $37,908.36 for every living man, woman and child in the country today.

That, my friends, was the tug on your wallet or purse.

Why?

Because, one of these days, and most likely on a day we least suspect it, someone — perhaps Japan, China or Great Britain, which collectively own more than half of all U.S. Treasury debt certificates — will want their money back to prop up their own collapsing economic house of cards.

To quote one series of recent bank credit card advertisements, "What's in your wallet?"