When it comes to bail out, are we now desensitized to the dollar amounts?
Wiser than Sotomayor asked:
When we first heard about the $700 BILLION bail out, everyone was outraged.
Then it grew to $850 Billion, and we were still upset, but we were glad to have it over with.
When we first heard about the $700 BILLION bail out, everyone was outraged.
Then it grew to $850 Billion, and we were still upset, but we were glad to have it over with.
AIG- $40 billion and lent Citigroup $20 billion (on top of the $25 billion it received from the first bailout batch).
Treasury dedicated another $20 billion to cover any losses that the Federal Reserve might suffer as a part of a new consumer loan bailout.
The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department said they will allocate $800 billion more to go to holders of loans backed by consumer debt in an attempt to jumpstart lending by the nation’s banks for mortgages, credit card purchases and cars.
And that may not be the last new bailout measure. There’s a growing chorus of voices outside of Treasury to spread bailout money around.
Are people still upset, or do we feel helpless with the situation?
Donna
August 19th, 2010 at 4:47 am
Sylvia
Not desensitized so much as feeling frustrated, helpless and seeing it as a bottomless hole that will take decades, if ever, to pull out of.
August 19th, 2010 at 11:51 am
Norma
I guess, I’m both disappointed and helpless in regards to the bail-outs.
If anything, they hurt the capitalist system. Businesses no longer have to be held accountable for their own decisions.
At the same time, while we spend nearly $1 trillion for all the bail outs combined, the war in Iraq alone cost about the same price and did little to reward our own country in return.
Americans are still losing jobs (hey, MY last day is Friday!), our education system sucks, teachers don’t get paid what they deserve, homelessness is on the rise, and you get chastised for suggesting that any of these people deserve something while the government farts away all this money to failed corporations.
It’s a bass-ackwards way of thinking and I’m shocked at the number of people who actually stubbornly disagree. What motive do they have? Nobody is asking for communism, but capitalism isn’t about giving the majority of the taxes I pay to banks and war, either.
To put the dollar amount in perspective, I’ve taken the estimated population of the United States, and the total dollars spent in labor according to the bureau of labor statistics. What I found was shocking. If everyone in this country, including the rich, paid the roughly 27% income tax as I pay ever pay check, the government would get nearly $2 trillion a year. Wow.
August 20th, 2010 at 8:33 am
Jeanne
What’s a trillion dollars?
A trillion dollars = $1,000,000,000,000.
That’s 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars.
The U.S. government spends more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Australia, China and Spain combined. If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.
Multiply this “200″ times and that’s the debt we (currently) have outstanding as a nation!