“Sitting down?” said Matthew Jaffe in ABC News. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general for the TARP financial bailout, estimates that, taken together, the recent federal bailouts could cost the U.S. as much as $23.7 trillion. “Yes, $23.7 trillion.” He counts more than just the TARP money, tallying all government programs to fight the current recession, largely through helping banks, automakers, and homebuyers.
Let’s put $23.7 trillion in perspective, said Eamon Javers in Politico. True, it covers “worst-case scenarios” in some 50 “economic disaster” programs dating back to 2007, but $23.7 trillion is nearly double the annual U.S. GDP. It’s more than the combined costs of every war the U.S. has fought, more than “the Moon landings and the New Deal,” and way more than we spent on the Great Depression.
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