$700 Billion, $7.77 Trillion... Who's Counting, Anyway?

The News You Can't Afford to Miss

I don't think it's possible to imagine a trillion dollars.  I'm not even sure most humans substantially understand the difference in order of magnitude once stats pass six or seven figures.  Honestly, what's the difference to most people between $100,000,000 (hundred million) and $1,000,000,000 (one billion)?  How about 100,000,000,000 (one-hundred billion)  and 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)?  After awhile, it's all just a matter of zeros. 

The TARP bailout - the really big one in 2008 that everybody has been so upset about - was seven hundred billion dollars --- $700,000,000,000. 

Besides a really great bank bailout, what else costs $700 billion?

For one thing, it will buy one year of operation for the United States Armed Forces.  Yep, base Pentagon expenditures tally in at just under seven hundred billion bucks, (and that does not include the added cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Libya).  With this figure, the United States accounted for 43% of all military spending worldwide in 2010 - more than the next seventeen highest-spending countries combined (click for cool graphic); and more than six times the amount spent by the nearest rival, China.

As long as we're batting in the ballpark, why not pony up a paltry $300 billion more and bail out U.S. student debt in its entirety?  Outstanding student loans are now estimated to have cleared the $1 trillion mark - with a record $100 million in new debt taken on in 2010.

Yeah, yeah, I know: "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!"  I heard it, too.

But that ain't even the half of it.

The really big number is the one thus far only floated in whispers and hushed rumors... the one the Fed and the largest banks worked hard to keep on the inside, the one they fought all the way to the Supreme Court until it finally leaked, oozing like the toxic credit default-swaps that so poisoned our economy:

$7.77 Trillion.  That's $7,770,000,000,000:  Seven-Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy Billion Dollars.  The high side of Thirteen Figures.

According to a groundbreaking article published by Bloomberg News on November 27th:

  "It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year".

GDP - the value of all goods and services produced - in the United States in 2009 was $14.25 trillion. 
The U.S., of course, is the largest economy in the world.

Your reaction probably isn't all that outrageous.  In fact, I doubt you so much as batted an eye as your brain scanned past those numbers just now.

And that's the sad part.  Sad because when the real crooks and cronies start playing with large enough sums of our money, even we, the true creators of said wealth, simply tend to "tune out" the numbers.  And who can blame us?  It's precisely because of the true scope and severity that the mind fails to comprehend the unbelievable extent of the crime.  Even though this is quite possibly the largest single financial heist in American history, even though it is undisputedly documented, even though this "secret bailout" with public funds was enacted by private enterprise and kept entirely hidden from government officials, even though nearly all the same individuals and institutions responsible for the madness are still in power and still making profit, with nary a check nor balance...Even though.

If you haven't read it yet, please: read the story.  It's our money they're playing with, and if we ever stand a chance to take it back, we're gonna have to start thinking big.  Really big.