Categories: All Business

The bailout: Even more than you thought

As this surprising graphic shows, the amount of money pledged to bail out the…

by Duncan Hood on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 3:51pm - 9 Comments

As this surprising graphic shows, the amount of money pledged to bail out the U.S. economy amounts to more than: the amount spent on getting a man on the moon, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq War, NASA’s all-time budget and The New Deal, combined. (And yes, the numbers are inflation-adjusted.) Imagine what the U.S. could have done with that money if it didn’t have to bail out all those banks…

This graphic is from the Voltage Blog, and it’s based on numbers from this BoingBoing article.

Tags: bailout, financial crisis, trillion, U.S.

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Jack Mitchell

Oh man.
Terry

Dear God.

How are they ever going to pay that back? Who is on the hook if they don’t?
http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

The $4.6 trillion number is where they are right now. If the worst case scenario happens US taxpayer could be responsible for up to $8..4 trillion, so far, because that doesn’t include anything Obama/Congress cook up when Obama takes over in late January.

Watched Lou Dobbs last night and he said you could give every man, women and child $60,000 and have some change left over if we are talking $8.4 trillion added to debt, which would stimulate the economy way more than anything they have done so far.

You have got to wonder what Congress is doing. They could have paid for every house that has been foreclosed in the past 18 months, add single payer health system like we have here in Canada, and double EI and welfare payments and that would be around $1 trillion I think. I wonder if the hundreds of billions spent so far is ever going to stimulate the economy, it seems they could have spent the money more wisely.
http://kitchenersown.blogspot.com/ Lord Kitchener’s Own

One thing to keep in mind (not that this makes things measurably better) is that this is money “pledged” not money “spent”. I believe it includes stuff like loan guarantees, many of which (though by no means all) will never actually be needed.

Even if you only count money actually spent, or that WILL be spent though, it’s a HUGE amount of money.
DAVID WATTS

Who said they HAD TO bail out the banks?? This was in an inside job if there ever was one mainly orchestrated by King Henry Paulson to enrich himself and his family while destroying his former competitors at Lehman Bros. The bailout is a fiasco. Consumer toxic debt is at the heart of the problem and to adress the problem the US government would have to rebate taxes to the American houshold to pay down debt and spend in order to stimulate spending. Unfortuantely the American household will not see any of these billions. It will all evaporate on Wall Street.
DAVID WATTS

And now the hapless Flaherty is trying to ape the Americans, well at least he was untill the coalition formed…
salieri82

This is the single greatest act of theft in human history – the rich gorging themselves full to bursting at the public trough. It’s time for a fundamental re-thinking of how businesses are organized. These people must not be allowed to steal our wealth any longer.
bigwilly

You do know that the US government might not only get all of that money back, but stands to MAKE money as well, right?…
http://projects.nytimes.com/creditcrisis/recipients/table premium

Tracking the $700 Billion Bailout: http://projects.nytimes.com/creditcrisis/recipients/table

(All amounts in above table are in millions.)