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[Dog§cout]

Someone cannot add. Or maybe they cannot read. Let us try this again; Seven Trillion. That is better. That is how much this 'bailout' has cost us so far. We haven't written all the checks yet. Most of this amount is guarantees that we have agreed to pay if the borrowers default. This is not 'good debt we are guaranteeing. It is loans made to people that before borrowing the current amount owed, had a history of slow or non payment. Today we added another commitment to write actual checks for another eight hundred billion. That should cover two of the fourteen segments of our economy that are in free-fall. Before we are done it is my forecast that the number that we will have written checks for will exceed ten trillion dollars; effectively doubling the country's national debt. To fix this problem, a problem created by greed and insanity, (let us be fair, not everyone who was involved in some capacity in lending money to people who were unlikely to pay it back, did so for a commission. Some actually believed that given a second (or third, or fourth) chance these people would raise themselves up by their bootstraps and make us proud), we will have spent thirty three thousand dollars from every man woman and child in the United States of America.

What could that money have bought? There are now forty-six million people in the USA with no health-care. We could have covered all of them for 217 years. There are roughly one hundred thirteen million children in grade school. At forty-five thousand dollars a year, we could have hired every single child a private tutor for two years. Just under one billion people in the world live with malnutrition. Ten percent of them die each year. We could have provided each one of them with two complete meals a day for 6½ years.

Do you have an idea yet as to how many resources we have squandered so that people whose ethics do not include paying back money they borrow could buy a house? So that a home loan broker could buy a boat? So that a couple with no children living at home could move into a six thousand square foot home? So that a couple just starting out could buy a house twice the size as the one they could really afford.

What is the effect of a twenty trillion dollar debt? The US Dollar becomes worth less; much less. Inflation will run rampant for years. It is possible that the leaders of some countries will decide to not accept US Dollars as payment for goods or gas. There may soon be a time that you will be happy to be able to pay four dollars a gallon for gas. Imagine that world, huh? In a country that relies on it's trucking system as much as we do, that could mean an empty grocery store. In rural areas that may not be as bad as it will be inconvenient. In urban areas the least that that will spark is riots. Perhaps cannibalism is a worst case scenario.

So go ahead and obtain your neighbor's credit report. If it is anything less than stellar, shoot him. It's all his fault!