Supersize My Bailout

In today's column, I mentioned briefly that the $1.2 Trillion (with a T as in Turkey) budget deficit reported today was without the recent stimulus and bailouts factored in. Read on.

SFO Magazine ran some analysis by market maven Jim Bianco in its current edition and the gist was that the government grants, loans and guarantees are practically more than the country has ever spent combined. Maybe I exaggerate but according to data compiled by Bianco, CNBC, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal the government is now on the hook for a potential $8.7 Trillion hickey, and I mean that in the vampire, not make-out, sense.

Here is the link to SFO's table on how deep we could be in the doo doo.
http://sfomag.com/images/charts/012009/GettingTech_fig1_0109.jpg

Basically, its $5.1T for the Fed, $1.5T for the FDIC and $1.8T for the Treasury

Check this from the magazine about major purchases from the past and present:

Marshall Plan—$115.3 billion

Louisiana Purchase—$217 billion

Race to the Moon—$237 billion

S&L Crisis—$256 billion

Korean War—$454 billion

The New Deal—$500 billion (estimated)

Gulf War II/War on Terror—$597 billion

Vietnam War—$698 billion

NASA (total cumulative spending since inception)—$851.2 billion

--Grand Total: $3.92 trillion

Can we spend our way out of this mess? Let's just fire up the money presses!