By John W. Lillpop
Seems like just yesterday that conservative and other right-thinking Americans considered one billion dollars an enormous amount of money. Spending that amount on anything except national defense was cause for high alarm and red flags from coast to coast.
That was then, this is now.
The reality now is that America has turned the keys to the US Treasury over to an inexperienced community organizer and bull headed socialist who has no compunctions whatsoever about using taxpayer money to fund his radical agenda.
Even more tragic, American voters have given copies of the Treasury key to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who, as congressional leaders are supposed to provide an oversight function to check the Executive branch, but whom, in reality, are just as reckless and irresponsible with taxpayer money as is President Obama.
With liberals in charge of America's money, the predictable result is chaos and ruin.
As reported, in part, at Politico.com, a worse case scenario could ultimately cost the good people of American $23 TRILLION dollars:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25164.html
" 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.
"For the government to be on the hook for the total amount, worst-case scenarios would have to come to pass in a variety of federal programs, which is unlikely, says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the government’s financial bailout programs, in testimony prepared for delivery to the House oversight committee Tuesday.
"In fact, $23 trillion is more than the total cost of all the wars the United States has ever fought, put together. World War II, for example, cost $4.1 trillion in 2008 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service.
"Even the Moon landings and the didn’t come close to $23 trillion: the Moon shot in 1969 cost an estimated $237 billion in current dollars, and the entire Depression-era Roosevelt relief program came in at $500 billion, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research."
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With that staggering amount of debt, or anything even close, facing the nation in the midst of a brutal recession, one would expect a reasonably intelligent, highly-educated president to put his liberal agenda on hold until the nation has had a chance to catch it's collective breath and think through all of the options.
Instead, Barack Obama continues to push radical health care reform, amnesty for illegal aliens, and radical climate change legislation, all of which will cost trillions of dollars that this nation simply does not have.
What will it take to get President Obama to step back and apply some common sense to America's financial challenges?
Unless that question is answered soon, we may soon be asking: What comes after trillion?
