A Trillion Here and A Trillion There…

According to an estimate by Bloomberg News released this morning, the sum of the new commitments already made by the federal government in its financial bailout has already reached a total of 8.5 trillion dollars, including loans, investments, guarantees, and other liabilities. Frankly, this is quite a lot more than I’d realized, and I closely read several newspapers each day.

As they say, “a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money…”

Another way of looking at it is that there are something like 100M households in America, and now each one suddenly owes $85,000 more than they did a few months ago.

Prior to hearing this latest figure, I really hadn’t been too concerned about the size of the Bailout. After all, it had seemed to me that once the dust settled, we could just round up all the “bad people” responsible for our problems, and sell them off on the international spare body-parts market, thereby defraying much of our financial expenses. Given the plentiful supply of “bad people” and some estimates that the organs from each reasonably healthy body-unit could bring many hundreds of thousands of dollars, I thought we could raise hundreds of billions, perhaps almost a trillion dollars in this easy manner. But $8.5 trillion is just too much to cover.

Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that once a few million extra body-units were put on the market, prices would rapidly fall, making it very difficult to push revenues past a certain point. This really is a serious problem.

 

Another surprise has been the interesting similarities and the differences between our own current financial difficulties, and the somewhat analogous problems of Weimar Russia about ten years ago. In that situation, the government went bankrupt and as a consequence, the entire national wealth was looted by the Oligarchs.

However, in America’s case, it’s actually the Oligarchs who’ve gone bankrupt…but are nonetheless still using the opportunity to loot the entire national wealth of our country!

Another similiarity is that Obama has put his economic policy in the hands of the Rubin/Summers circle, which also controlled Russia’s economic policy during the Yeltsin/Oligarch period.

I somehow get the feeling there’s some other similarity out there as well…but I just can’t quite put my finger on it…

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