An Arizona State University economics professor says our current economic nightmare is ‘hopefully' a once in a lifetime event.

Anthony Sanders with the WP Carey School of Business says the United States is happy to put the year 2008 in the rear view mirror because the past few months have seen the worst economic times since the Great Depression.

He says the repeated bailouts of everybody from banks to car makers to insurance companies went massively awry.

"We have - the retail industry wants a bailout, everybody wants a bailout - in other words, I would call this in terms of Roman history, the great sacking of the Treasury."

Sanders says essentially the U.S. has been bankrupted by bailouts and there's no end in sight. "It's just despicable to watch this happening. (President) Bush, certainly, was in favor of it. (President-elect) Obama I can't see is going to stop it. He's going to be in favor of that too. So, what we're seeing essentially is a looting and bankruptcy of the U.S. government."

Sanders says the political will to just say no to bailouts is not there and it will take generations to pay off our massive debt load.

He says he's lost faith in congress with each passing bailout. And now he's lost faith in the public's ability to ‘not' be able to read through the marketing of bailouts.

Sanders says the American public was presented with day after day of doom and gloom scenarios on the "what ifs" that included what if AIG failed, or the banks, or the car makers. "Who cares if Ford goes under? Yeah, if I'm an employee of Ford, but then again, I wouldn't want to have to lose my job. But then again, you could have lowered your wage rates. There's a whole bunch of arguments for why we should not have bailed out these companies."