Sunday, January 11, 2009

How Much Stimulus And Bailout Spending Is Enough?

Meet The Press' David Gregory showed an interesting chart on his show today during a round table discussion about what President-elect Obama needs to do to get the economy out of this recession. Obama's answer at this point is for the federal government to spend more money. If you look at how much money the government has already committed over the past year ($1.2 trillion) to bail out and stimulate this economy, you can't help but ask if we're just throwing more bad money we don't have after bad money we've already spent. Here are the numbers:

Bush Stimulus Package $168 billion
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Bailout $200 billion
AIG Bailout $122 billion
TARP Financial Bailout $700 billion
Obama Stimulus Plan $775 billion

TOTAL SPENDING $1.9 trillion

UPDATE: Or how about $7.36 trillion. That's the figure at which NBC's sister business network, CNBC, pegs the total cost of the bailout, more than double the cost of World War II. A lot of Federal Reserve spending isn't counted in the NBC numbers. I'm curious why Gregory didn't use CNBC's numbers. Hat tip to the reader who pointed out the CNBC numbers.

3 comments:

M Theory said...

Wealthy Merrill Lynch customers want their accounts settled in Krugerrands. Merrill Lynch says the price of gold will be $1150 per ounce by summer. You know that figure is low because they don't want to say anything which will further drive up the cost of gold (since they are now being requested to settle accounts in it).

Hat tip to the new site LibertyFile.com for the news story.

Sean Shepard said...

$1.2 trillion is about the same amount the personal income tax brings in.

Literally, if we wanted to run trillion dollar deficits, they could have just gotten rid of the personal income tax for everybody.

Instead, we're now going to deeper into debt to intervene in an economy that was suffering from too much debt and intervention.

As Glenn Beck says, "it makes blood shoot out of my eyes."

Concerned Taxpayer said...

I wonder if people who are worshipping "The One" have ANY idea where this money comes from.