If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.
Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:
• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billionTOTAL: $3.92 trillion
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data courtesy of Bianco Research
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That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far.
The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
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Adjusted for inflation, O.K., but not normalized to the size of the economy or the population, both of which I imagine are a lot bigger today than in FDR's. WWII transformed the economy and touched everybody. Our contemporary wars didn't need a draft, the creation of a weapons-building infrastructure or buildup of an arsenal the way America's WWII campaigns needed to reach full ferocity, but they take maintaining, and how many people do you know who are involved in that, either as military and government employees or as contractors? I don't know anybody, or don't knowingly know anybody. Were I alive in WWII I wouldn't be bowling so much alone, I suppose, but I'd have to be a recluse and a misanthrope to be so disconnected from WWII in 1945...is my sense of the times. To get those outlays in per capita dollars or percentage of GDP, you might have to divide by 20...to pick a number out of the ether between my ears.
i.e. divide the current and proposed outlays by 20 to normalize them for comparison to the historic ones in terms of GDP, is what I'm speculating.
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