Maybe that needs to become the rallying cry for those who oppose the fiscal insanity in Washington DC these days (including the Tea Parties, which are starting to overrun the professionally-organized Leftists of MoveOn and ACORN). This was the part of the statement Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, in powerfully defending his estimate that those bailouts- supported across both parties’ administrations- put the American taxpayer and the generations to follow on the hook for $23.7 Trillion:
Called the “SIGTARP,” Barofsky appeared before Congress this week and told them that the government’s commitment to fix the financial system could potentially reach $23.7 trillion, and criticized the Treasury Department for calling his team’s estimate “inflated.”
“I think that the Treasury Department ought to read the report before they make comments, at least the spokesperson’s office,” Barofsky said. “Our methodology is laid out in black and white in the report. … As far as the numbers being inflated, where do you think we got the numbers from? We got it from the Treasury Department, we got it from the Federal Reserve. … If these numbers are inflated, it’s because they inflated them when they put them out in the public, not because of us.” …
“Perhaps their criticism is that we dare to do math,” he said. He added that his team tried to convince the Treasury that they were wrong, and that recipients should be required to report on how they use the federal funds, and those should be shown to the American people so that they know it’s “not being thrown into a black hole.”
Just a reminder of what $1 trillion looks like: the pallets of $100 bills in the bottom picture would stacked 47 high for this indebtness alone! Add to that the Medicare/medicaid, the planned health care fixes, plus Cap & trade and the only visualization possible is national bankruptcy.
Filed under: Politics
