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The New York Times recently discussed the pros and cons of the bailout bill that has been splashed all over the front pages of newspapers and home pages of news sites. Although many enduring mortgage woes are hoping that this bailout will help them to keep their homes and keep banks from falling under the wheel of the "mortgage crisis" it is also raising fears that the government is biting off more than it can chew.

Some question the prudence of adding to the nation’s overall debt at a time when the Treasury relies on the largess of foreigners to cover the bills. Even so, there is wide agreement that a broad intervention like the one Treasury is proposing is necessary.

“It goes a long way; it ameliorates it very substantially,” said Alan S. Blinder, an economist at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the board of governors at the Federal Reserve, who has said for months that the government must step in forcefully to buy mortgage-linked investments.

“We’re deep into Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole,” Mr. Blinder said.

But significant skepticism confronts the plan. Under a proposal circulating Saturday, the Treasury could spend as much as $700 billion to buy mortgage-linked investments, then sell what it can as it works out the messy details of the loans. But no one really knows what this cosmically complex web of finance will be worth, making the final price tag for the taxpayer unknowable. One may just as well try to predict the weather three years from Tuesday.

It seems as though many have forgotten exactly what has caused this crisis. With rumors about banks and mortgage companies and doomsayers claiming the end it is sometimes hard to recall just when this started and how.

“The risk of ending up like Japan, with 10 years of stagnation, is now much lessened,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “The recession train has left the station, but it’s going to be 18 months instead of five years.”

If the plan works, it will attack the central cause of American economic distress: the continued plunge in housing prices. If banks resumed lending more liberally, mortgages would become more readily available. That would give more people the wherewithal to buy homes, lifting housing prices or at least preventing them from falling further. This would prevent more mortgage-linked investments from going bad, further easing the strain on banks. As a result, the current downward spiral would end and start heading up.

“It’s easy to forget amid all the fancy stuff — credit derivatives, swaps — that the root cause of all this is declining house prices,” Mr. Blinder said. “If you can reverse that, then people start coming out of their foxholes and start putting their money in places they have been too afraid to put it.