$7.4 trillion
This has gotten completely out of control:
The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
Comments
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." -- Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson may not have imagined that the entire scheme he foresaw would be aided and abetted by a government "of, by, and for the people". We are witnessing nothing less than the financial fleecing of the whole of society to benefit a privileged few who refuse to live with the consequences of their decisions, enabled by the coercive power of an illicit government that far oversteps its Consitutional boundaries by even pretending to have legitimate power to impose these policies upon us.
Posted by: The Night Rider | November 24, 2008 04:03 PM
Amen, Night Rider!
Posted by: Rick | November 25, 2008 03:44 PM