Remember when we were up in arms over the $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of the banking industry?Those were the days. With the government now mulling the establishment of an "aggregator bank" to buy all the bad assets of all the banks, former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says that the cost of the bailout could be $4 trillion by the time this is done.
Four trillion dollars is a lot of lettuce. To help put it in perspective consider this. As of July of 2008, the CIA estimated the US population at 303,824,640. If the total cost of the bailout comes to $4 trillion, that will work out to a bill of $13,165.49 for every man, woman, child and incarcerated felon in America.
What does it all mean? I'm not really sure. But given that you (more precisely, your great-great-great-great grandchildren) are cutting a check for more than $13,000 to the financial industry, don't you think that we are perhaps entitled to a higher level of customer service? Could they upgrade the quality of the lollipops, perhaps?
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