Putting the bailout in perspective

Don’t read this if you want to sleep well tonight.   Stay away from the comments too.  People would be swarming in the streets with pitchforks and torches tonight, except that so many of us are afflicted with innumeracy and because we are so easily distractible.  How many of us have spent more time studying the economy in the last year than we’ve spent A) watching sports on TV, B) reading newspaper comics or C) [fill in the blank with any idle activity]?

How can it possibly be that we are committing these sums of money without a reliable accounting being presented to the American public for where all of that money is really going?  I don’t know any more than anyone else who tries to keep up with the news, but I can guarantee this:  There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud being committed on the American people, as evidence by the lack of forthright information about where that money is really going.  Sunshine is a great disinfectant, and we don’t have any sunshine these days.  That’s how we’re capping off eight years of darkness.

There are many days when I fear that it’s too late for Obama (or anyone else) to salvage any semblance of the American standard of living.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Dan Klarmann
    Dan Klarmann

    $700B = $5,000 per taxpayer (give or take). What capital is this investment buying? Is the government buying all these failed banks, or just handing money to them? Which of these is closer to Socialism?

  2. Avatar of projektleiterin
    projektleiterin

    I'm confused about this:

    • Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion

    I thought he was taking the previous amounts of money and recalculated it to take into account the inflation in order to be able to compare previous rates with the current rate, but the invasion of Iraq is a current event and the costs are current costs. Why and how is he adjusting the costs to the inflation???

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    The Treasury Department has no mechanism in place to track how institutions are using $150 billion in taxpayer money that the government injected into the banking system as of last month, the Government Accountability Office concluded in its report to Congress.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081203/ap_on_bi_ge/f

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