A few questions

Firstly, I want to make a plug for a commentator that I really enjoy. His name is Dan Carlin, and his two podcasts and other aspects of his website can be found at www.dancarlin.com . He does a current events podcast called "common sense" and a history podcast called, "hardcore history". In a couple of his recent podcasts he made some points that intrigued me, but i have been unable to track down references. If anyone has any suggestions on where to find information on any of the following ideas/concepts, or any comments directly, I anxiously await.
1) Bailouts/Goverment Spending.
He claims that we are currently in the whole roughly 10 trillion dollars. He then goes on to make an effort to explain just how much money that is. He takes a handful of expensive, very big endeavors in American history, adjusts them for inflation and then adds them up. The following events all add up to about 3 trillion dollars after being adjusted for inflation: Louisiana Purchase, Marshall Plan, The New Deal, All of NASAs udget, The Savings and Loan crisis, The Iraq war (part 2) and I may be missing some. Also, all of ww2, adjusted for inflation equals about 3 trillion. So adding up all of those major events in american history add up to about 60% what we are currently in debt for. But here's the thing rthat gets me. Those other things did an awful lot, what exactly is this current debt going to accomplish? Because so far, it has done precisely nothing.

2) war coverage.
Dan carlin had some sorta mean things to say about Woodrow Wilson. Apparently you could have been tossed in jail for publicly denoucning the effort in ww1. Also, wilson apparently started the trend of making illegal the journalistic covering of the war. By the time ww2 came around, FDR thought that perhaps the lack of war coverage was distancing the american public from the war effort and so he reversed it. And, that decision had the opposite effect of what wilson thought would happen, it energized the population. Showing american troops being killed got people fired up and garnered support for the war effort. Why? Because the population thought that ww2 was a just-war and they wanted to win. Cycle ahead to Vietnam when i believe the Nixon administration took away the right to cover the war, b/c he felt like it was curtailing support.
The point of the rant was that whether or not the sight of photos/video of a war effort has a positive effect on people's views of the war has to do with the context of the war. If they feel it a just war, they will support it in spite of or perhaps increase support b/c of photos. However, if they don't like the war, the photos will have the opposite. So to me, it seems that if you wanted to be a democratic president and actually allow the people to govern, as they say we are supposed to, you would want as much coverage of the war as is realistically possible, w/o endangering troops.
My search for references on this idea is really the history of presidents and war censorship.