They have almost made a clean getaway, still looking over their shoulders but receding into the distance. Question: how can we cut the debt and balance the budget without cutting a single program or hurting a single person except those who will have plenty left? The genius of the current robbery taking place in Washington as they prepare to slash entitlements as the "big ticket" items on which we are going to have to make "hard choices," is that there is another big ticket item which, along with Pentagon spending and wars, put us here in the first place.
Funny, I don't see anything on "Debt Clock" about this all-time greatest theft in world history, the bail-outs for hypocrites always talking about the free market until their turn for socialism comes around. I don't see the multi-trillion bail-outs for bankers who went to Las Vegas to play subprime roulette up there with the "big three" which they say are responsible for most government spending: Social Security, Pentagon, and Medicare/Medicaide. It's the money they lost which the taxpayers covered which should now be going to shore up Medicaire and Social Security (which has always been solvent until it starting getting raided to bail out the rest of the government)
Politico says:
A series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion, the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire economic output for a year.
If the feds end up spending that amount, it could be more than the federal government has spent on any single effort in American history...
Beyond these projections, a more recent San Francisco Chronicle article reports that the actual cost of the bail-outs has already hit $8 trillion.
To put that into some kind of context, you can call what they call the three biggies, Social Security, Pentagon/wars, and medicare/Medicaid, iat around 3/4 of a trillion a year, each.
No, I don't see it on usdebtclock.org, nor do I hear any congressmen of either party talking about it in hushed somber tones about "sacrifices" for the "greater good", I don't hear the Tea Party talking about it, which strangely, is what they got started over. That's before they got hijacked by the GOP which managed to fool enough of them into thinking their own SS benefits were the great evil. Some trick that.
Two of the early Tea Party protests were February 27, 2009 to protest the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) bailout bill signed by President George W. Bush in October 2008 and the ARRA stimulus bill signed by President Barack Obama ten days prior to the protest.
Are the corporate execs who are giving themselves outrageous perks going to sacrifice, like the one whose kid takes a private jet ride to school every day? Please lean over, I have something to whisper into your ear: suckerrrr!
This is a short diary. There is nothing to read about; you know what is going on. It's time to slam them with WTF, who do you think you are kidding? Talk about the bail-outs and getting that money back, not my retirement. We might be stupid. But we're not THAT stupid.
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