One trillion dollars spent without a single vote
Here is an e-mail I just got from the Libertarian party, suggesting that perhaps we should be a little more upset than we are with the bailout. Even if you’re not normally inclined to listen to the Libertarians, I think they have a point here. A trillion dollar bailout to avoid a financial disaster? That is a financial disaster, and one being paid for by the wrong people!
Like most Americans, I’m sure you were glued to the news about the “financial crisis” and the government’s “fix” for the problem. You probably heard that the government was going to come in and save the mortgage industry by bailing out failing corporations. And, you probably heard both Barack Obama and John McCain say that this bailout was necessary, and good for the economy.
What you probably didn’t hear was that it was going to cost up to $1 trillion dollars, and you were responsible for this money.
“American taxpayers will come up with the money,” says the New York Times.
Such a number is hard to conceptualize if you’re not the government. So, in order to show you just how much $1 trillion dollars really is, we’ve put together these figures:
One trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is enough money:
- To buy everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo.
- To buy 88,052, 394′ custom mega yachts; enough to stretch around ¼ of the world.
- To buy everyone living in Belize and Malta a Manhattan apartment.
- To get half of the Democratic Party into a fundraiser for Barack Obama at the $28,500 admission price.
- To give one out of every two men in the United States a Men’s Presidential Rolex watch.
- To buy every woman in the United States a Tiffany Diamond Starfish Pendant.
- To get two Mitsubishi 73″ HDTVs for every household in America.
- To buy four copies of The Office: Season Four on DVD, to every person on earth.
- To send everybody in America on an all-inclusive vacation to Tahiti (and some people can stay a few extra days).
AND…
$1 trillion is enough money for everyone in Buffalo, NY to buy their own 65-acre island in Panama.
This is how much the government is going to cost you (roughly $3,278 for every man, woman and child in the United States).
Barack Obama is for it. John McCain is for it.
But, Bob Barr and Libertarian Party are against it.
“No one voted to pour taxpayer funds into Wall Street,” says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, “and no one voted for the government to take over an insurance company. If the Federal Reserve can spend as much money as it desires to bail out any company that it desires, is there anything that it cannot do with taxpayer funds?
The day before the bailout was announced I read an article in Scientific American that was a proposal for a giant solar plant in the southwest and a new electric delivery backbone. The authors calculated that it could provide something like 80% (i could be wrong about the figure, the article isn’t in front of me) of U.S. energy needs. That’s *energy* needs, not electricity needs, so that includes transportation. They further estimated that the cost would be $400billion spread over a long time period (30 years I think).
I have no opinion on the merits of their particular plan, my point is just that if we’re going to spend this kind of money, it’s pretty likely that there are better ways to spend it. And I think that conclusion holds whether or not you’re against big gubment.