Twenty-three Trillion Dollars?

Special inspector general Neil Barofsky, overseer of the Troubled Asset Relief Program reported to Congress yesterday that the federal government has shoveled $4.7 trillion into Wall Street, and that our maximum exposure could total $23.7 trillion, or $80,000 for every American.

Closest I can come to getting my mind around these figures is to think of the run on the Bailey Building and Loan, when George Bailey doled out his honeymoon bankroll to the panicked mob. The four trillion is what he passed out, against the twenty-three trillion the people saw in their passbooks.

All this while the Congress is in vapor-lock over the CBO- estimated cost of universal health insurance topping one trillion dollars over ten years time. In a country that has spent three trillion dollars so far making war in Iraq.

Last week I read that Goldman Sachs has earmarked $11 billion so far this year for bonuses. The same week that I read Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone saying that Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression, such as the oil futures market, whereby when you buy a tank of gasoline, the gas has been bought and sold eleven times already.

My eyes glaze over.

I liked Barney Franks’ take on the bonus story; that he took it to mean that Wall Street was asking Congress to act on executive compensation.

I remember George W. Bush saying that the economy was evidently in great shape because we were minting so many new billionaires. Makes me think “so that’s where all the money went.”

Starting to think that the solution to billionaires is to send in James Bond to blow up their island fortress and watch it sink into the sea.