Bailouts Make Price Of WW-II Look Like Chump Change
It wasn’t even a month ago that we posted on the real cost of the bailout mania that has hit Washington–not the widely reported $700 billion, but $7.7 TRILLION. Now, mere weeks later, those figures have been … er … “revised upwards” by a full $1 trillion. From Politico (emphasis added):
As the holiday season commences, it’s worth taking stock of the last gift that President George W. Bush and the 110th Congress have left for U.S. taxpayers.
It’s a package of about $8.7 trillion dollars’ worth of potential taxpayer commitments for loans, guarantees and other bailout goodies for businesses and distressed homeowners.
The word trillion just doesn’t do the enormity of the figure justice, so here it is writ large, for a little better perspective:
$8,700,000,000,000
Just how much money are we talking about here? According to James Bianco of Bianco Research, quoted in the Politico piece, more than the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, and the Louisiana Purchase combined. And that’s in inflation-adjusted dollars, mind you. But that’s just the start:
If you take those three items, add in the adjusted costs of the Race to the Moon, the savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War and assistance for NASA, you still get to just $3.92 trillion - not even half of the taxpayers’ exposure today, according to Bianco.
To recap: we went to the moon and funded the space program; we got through the Great Depression; we rebuilt war-ravaged Europe; we purchased nearly one million square miles of the Midwest, Mountain West, and southern United States; we weathered the savings and loan crisis; and we fought three wars on foreign soils–all for less than half of what we’re shelling out for these bailouts.
As The Big Picture blog pointed out last month, the only expenditure that even comes close to the recent craziness is World War II. Adjusted for inflation, we spent $3.6 trillion on that. That means you can throw it into everything else described above and you still wouldn’t match what taxpayers are liable for today.
Something ain’t right. Either our problems are much, much larger than we’ve been led to believe or our government officials have been much, much stupider than we could have imagined. How about both?:
Asked just how much the taxpayers are on the hook for, Bianco said: “I just say you should use the number infinity, because nobody understands these numbers, and I would include the Treasury secretary and chairman of the Fed in that group.”
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