Courtesy of Benign Brodwicz at The Animal Spirits Page
Via: Huffington Post If you haven’t written and called your Congressional rep’s and your President, it’s past time to do so. Arianna Huffington should like the Benign Brodwicz program for the economy.
Okay, the bailout of Wall Street isn’t going to end up costing us $23.7 trillion dollars, the number that special inspector general Neil Barofsky fired off to call attention to the fact that banks are misusing the trillions we’ve given them, and are still hiding untold amounts of toxic assets off the books — aided and abetted by the who-needs-transparency Treasury.
But we have pumped at least $4.7 trillion into the financial sector — and the pumping isn’t over. On Wednesday, Fed chair Ben Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee that it "may be appropriate" for the government to guarantee the "mountains" of commercial real estate mortgage defaults the banks will likely be facing in the coming months.
At a certain point, these numbers are so huge it becomes hard to keep them in perspective, to be clear what $4,700,000,000,000 means in the real world. But reading about the effects of the massive budget cuts almost every state in the country is being forced to make puts the figure in perspective very fast.
And it reminds us, once again, how lopsided the "recovery" has been: with banks that received billions in taxpayer handouts now reporting massive profits and setting aside record amounts for executive bonuses, and the American people continuing to face 9.5 percent unemployment, 10,000 foreclosures a day, and vital services being cut.
So while Goldman Sachs crows about its $3.44 billion second-quarter profit, and Citigroup and Bank of America strut over the $3 billion and $2.4 billion they respectively earned, we are left to think about the opportunity cost of the trillions we have given to Wall Street — to ponder what else we could have done with that money.
Consider:at least 39 states have imposed budget cuts that hurt families and reduce vital services to their most vulnerable residents. The litany of those affected includes children, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the homeless,
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