Nov 25, 2008

Hey buddy, can you spare a dime....

... or $5 Trillion, so I can get a hot meal. Thanks!

I'd just like to say, kids are great. They have that wide-eyed innocence and naivete about them and they're quick to help out a friend in need (even if they haven't been born yet!) I just wish I had kids, so I could take out credit cards in their names.

Curious what I'm talking about? These bailout bills that keep showing up in the news are staggering in scope and I just found a blog post that puts them into context.
If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

This doesn't mean we necessarily should not do it, leaving the next generation a crumbled economy helps no one. It does mean that we should expect and demand that the bailout should have a massive impact on how humans live on the planet.

As we sell the next generation of Americans into desperate debt the least we can do is leave them a well running planet. Or, perhaps, we should just continue to funnel resources to the greediest generation of Americans in history, the Baby Boomers.