$14,762 Each

September 21st, 2008 Posted in politics

They call this bailout a “troubled asset relief program” or TARP. Don’t you cover things up with a TARP? Financial prowess has only been eclipsed by marketing genius.

They’ve said the bailout will cost $700,000,000,000. But, you can’t say they have been exactly accurate in estimating the true cost for projects like this before. So for giggles let’s inflate it by 1.5 to $1,050,000,000,000. There are 138,000,000 tax payers in the U.S. Half of those pay about 97% of all Federal income tax. To be in the top 50% of tax payers you have to be making $31,987 or more in adjusted gross income. So applying a bit of math I estimate the bailout liability to be $14,762 for each of these tax payers.

The median home price is $212,400. At $14,762 of bailout per tax payer, you and 13 of your friends can be thanked for assuming the liability for someone else’s home.

I’ve heard that Treasury is going to collect all this bad debt, wait for the market to rebound, and then (hopefully) sell at a profit. Therefore all of this would be cost neutral to tax payers. Call me skeptical, but isn’t this coming from the same people who allowed the problem to get to this point?

Once they have our money will turning off the spigot be a priority? Somehow I think not. My gut says we are being played.

  1. One Response to “$14,762 Each”

  2. By Mike Schinkel on Oct 2, 2008

    To paraphrase an oft-revered conservative icon: “Well, there you go again.” ;-)

    I’ll give you credit for finding a fair could of taxpayers (138 million in 2007), but I don’t think it’s fair to inflate the cost by 150% if for no other reason than this will likely have more continuous scrutiny than any spending bill in our history.

    So if we accept your concept of 50% of taxpayers instead of applying it to all then we are talking more lake $10k instead of $15k.

    Which is a HELL of a lot of money. So my point is “Why spin it when the non-spun version is so bad?” Spinning it just questions your credibility and as an aside that’s the problem I have with almost all the conservative pundits in general; I don’t trust em one iota because they are always spinning.

    FWIW: if it’s not obvious I share your sentiment about the bailout. A $700B incursion into the free market sucks ass no matter how you slice it.

    BTW, why is it people are getting so upset about $700B when so many of the same people have exuded so much testosterone and proudly beat their chests to spend almost $600B in Iraq, and now are blocking all efforts to stem the bleeding (pun intended)? Is it really smart for us to “spare no expense” when it comes to wars of our own volition? Why is almost nobody else seems to be asking this question?

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