Bloomberg reported a frightening fact this morning: The U.S. government has spent committed nearly as much on to bailing out financial firms — $12.8 trillion, when you total up guarantees and loans given by the Treasury, Fed, and FDIC — as the nation’s entire $14.2 trillion domestic product.
But that’s not the only eye-popping bailout number that was released today. In a Senate Finance Committee hearing today, panel chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) noted that the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) has put taxpayers on the book for at least $2.9 trillion. That number is almost equal to the U.S. government’s total spending during the 2008 fiscal year, which you can find in Table 5 of this document.
Baucus described the bailout as a shadow U.S. budget “dedicated solely to saving the financial system, and that is truly surreal.”
