Americans thought Congress was awful last year, maybe the worst ever. At one point, it received a 9 percent approval rating.

But what will Americans be thinking when this Congress is finished?

This Congress is making the last one look like a Mensa gathering, treating the Treasury like a piñata full of free money that they take whacks at while blindfolded.

Congress and the president may be merrily leading us to a collapse of the dollar.

They're passing massive, unprecedented, scattershot spending bills that none of them have read. They're attempting a takeover of private commerce in the form of "cap and trade" limits on emissions. They're trying to sneak a highly controversial and most likely unconstitutional hate-crimes bill through, under the cover of a defense spending bill.

And now they're barreling toward a health-care reform package that could cost a trillion or more and grind the economy to a halt -- in bills that, again, may be too long for anyone to have read all the way through.

In short, this Congress is doing infinitely more damage to America than last year's "worst-ever" crowd did.

You have to wonder why the public voted last year's Congress among the worst -- and then added to the majority. But we've made our bed.

Meanwhile, a president who, by a few percentage points, won an election that was primarily a rebuke of his term-limited outgoing predecessor, is behaving like a man with a mammoth mandate to turn just about everything in the nation inside-out.

Now, just six months in, many Americans see the nation careening out of control.

Count the Congressional Budget Office among them.

"The coverage proposals in this legislation," nonpartisan CBO director Douglas Elmendorf told Congress last week, "would expand federal spending on health care to a significant degree and in our analysis so far we don't see other provisions in this legislation reducing federal health spending by a corresponding degree."

He was being polite. In short, he was saying the health-care bills will break the bank even further than it is already.

How broke is it now? We've got some $11 trillion in national debt already, and Washington is going to add close to $2 trillion in debt this year alone. Future required spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is expected to be north of $50 trillion.

Not all debt is bad. It's OK to borrow for capital improvements, for infrastructure improvement. That's an investment. But that's not what Washington is doing; our leaders are borrowing from our children and grandchildren to pay for ongoing expenses -- in other words, for current consumption.

That's immoral. And it's what our leaders are giving us.

With our tacit approval at this point, sad to say.

"The federal budget is on an unsustainable path," CBO director Elmendorf wrote on his blog this week.

If we stay on that path, this Congress may be adjudged by history as the worst ever.

And those who put them there will be no more favorably viewed.