Henry Paulson, ex Goldman Sachs partner and now Secretary of the Treasury , would like the U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for $700 billion to buy risky, underperforming assets from large Wall Street investment banks, as their profitability takes and dip and the executives still rake in billions. Aw, those poor investment banking businesses got stuck holding risky assets. Let's help them so they don't suffer losses.
Look at it like this. It's like winning lots of money at the high roller's table at Ceasers in Las Vegas night after night, and buying yourself fancy cars and houses in the Hamptons with all your winnings, and then one night you lose big and the floor manager comes up and taps you on the shoulder and hands you $700 billion in chips.
Let's think about our priorities.
Barack Obama's plan for providing affordable healthcare for everyone will cost $50 to $65 billion per year. That is the cost of making it possible for every man woman and child to have access to the medical treatment that should be a right, not a privilege, for all Americans. That is the cost of making a life and death difference for millions of people. The $700 billion that they want to use to bail out investment banks would foot the bill for universal healthcare for 14 years.
We spend about $3 billion per year on research of alternative energies. That is something that could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, make us more secure and financially stable and possibly save our planet. It would solve incalculable issues. For $700 billion we could all be driving around in hydrogen powered cars whose tailpipes emit drinkable water. How much would that change our country and our planet?!?! Compare our $3 billion budget for alternative energy research to the $12 per month that we have spent for 5 years to support this occupation of a sovereign nation for oil! Talk about backwards, mixed-up, inside-out priorities!
The Washington Post extimates that Iraq will cost us $3 trillion. The mortgage bailout is another trillion. Add onto that the cost of other "War on Terror" follies and the cost of 9/11 (which was a homeland defense breakdown on Bush's watch) and we are talked about what... $4.5 trillion of needless, wasted money thrown down a rat-hole all attributable to the Republican administrations bad policies!
That's 4,500,000,000,000.00.
Think about that. Let that sink in a little bit.
How many opportunities have been lost over the last 8 years? How many schools could that have built? How much potential could we have tapped into by educated our poor inner-city youth? How much progress could we have made in developing new green technologies? How many LIVES could have been saved by getting people much-needed cancer treatments and early detection? How much improvement could we have done to our failing infrastructure and how many jobs would those public works projects have generated?
It is truly incomprehensible.