Fellow taxpayers: in your capacity as majority owners of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you have already been most generous, giving $160 billion of your hard-earned money to bail out the perpetually-failing GSEs. But apparently your charity knows no bounds! According to Bloomberg, you’ve got so much more to give:

The Congressional Budget Office calculated in August 2009 that the companies would need $389 billion in federal subsidies through 2019, based on assumptions about delinquency rates of loans in their securities pools. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget estimated in February that aid could total as little as $160 billion if the economy strengthens.
If housing prices drop further, the companies may need more. Barclays Capital Inc. analysts put the price tag as high as $500 billion in a December report on mortgage-backed securities, assuming home prices decline another 20 percent and default rates triple.
Sean Egan, president of Egan-Jones Ratings Co. in Haverford, Pennsylvania, said that a 20 percent loss on the companies’ loans and guarantees, along the lines of other large market players such as Countrywide Financial Corp., now owned by Bank of America Corp., could cause even more damage.
“One trillion dollars is a reasonable worst-case scenario for the companies,” said Egan, whose firm warned customers away from municipal bond insurers in 2002 and downgraded Enron Corp. a month before its 2001 collapse.
[. . .]
“It is the mother of all bailouts,” said Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, who is now a consultant to the mortgage-finance industry.

You’d think reversing the thrusters and getting us away from the event horizon of this fiscal black hole would be higher-up on the list congressional priorities than telling Macy’s how much it can charge you to use your debit card, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong. The Goldman-Sachs endorsed Dodd Bill barely lays a finger on the GSEs (though, if you’re lucky, maybe the newly-created consumer protection agency will send you a little pamphlet outlining the risks of investing in the housing sector).

But hey, thank Kevin for giving us a little perspective here. That $1 trillion is little more than a rounding error against the figure of our total public debt.