The real price tag for stimulus: Between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion

Washington Post ^ | February 9, 2012 | by Ezra Klein

[Oldeconomybuyer]

There’s been a lot of discussion over whether we should have had a smaller or larger stimulus package. But a lot of these arguments leave a key question unanswered: How much stimulus did we actually pass?

There was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, of course. That was the big gun. But after that, there were dozens of smaller measures passed. For instance: The White House only put a single year of expanded unemployment insurance into the original stimulus. They did that, in part, because they expected they would be able to get unemployment insurance extended on its own. That allowed them to show a lower number for ARRA, but more stimulus in total.

The latest estimate on ARRA is that it cost — including the AMT patch — $821 billion. Subsequently, we passed another $383 billion in items that could properly be seen as stimulus or recovery measures — think the payroll tax cut, extensions of unemployment benefits and the first-time home buyer’s tax credit, that sort of thing.

So I’d say a reasonable range for the amount of stimulus we actually passed is, depending on how you want to set your definitions, is between $1 trillion, once you subtract measures like the AMT patch that were called stimulus but weren’t actually stimulus, and $1.7 trillion if you want to use the most expansive definition possible and also include every policy passed to keep taxes low.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

[PMAS]

*

[griswold3]

Ezra Klein's 'Blame Bush' explanation. The government did NOT lose revenue with the tax cuts. State and local government made up the difference with items like 'Commercial Activity Taxes'. I've never paid a 'Universal Carrier Fee' before the 'Bush Tax Cuts', either. i.e. 2007 Total Revenue was $5.17T with GDP $13.969T. http://wap.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?year=1902_2015&view=1&expand&units=p&log=linear&fy=fy12&chart=F0-total&bar=0&stack=1&size=l&title&state=US&color=c&loc...al=sI Then the Democrats took over Congress.

[mosesdapoet]

To pay off a trillion dollars at a dollar a second would take 31,564 years. But at a billion dollars a second now that’s better, it’s only 989 give or take a few years...But then there’s the interest.

[Liz]

Candidate Barack Obama told us on the campaign trail: " The problem is, that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, # 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome so that now we have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back, $30,000 for every man woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic."

REALITY CHECK Obama presided over the biggest political heist in US history. The Obamanations (insiders and politicians) sucked up trillions under the guise of inheriting the "Bush financial crisis."

THIS MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD Obama COS Rahm Emanuel "suddenly" discovered he wanted to be Chicago's mayor---the little turn went before the mics and announced his campaign "raised $10 million in just a few weeks." Rahm also controlled the US Treasury as COS.

================================================

What the so-called "collapse" of the banking system wrought under Obama:

FOURTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS Behind The Real Size of the Bailout; A guide to the abbreviations, acronyms, and obscure programs that make up the $14 trillion federal bailout of Wall Street
SOURCE motherjones.com
Mon Dec. 21, 2009 12:23 PM PST

The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets.

To get a sense of the size of the real $14 trillion bailout, see our chart at web site. Below, a guide to the pieces of the puzzle:

Treasury Department bailout programs
(Remember that Obama's Treasury Dept was controlled by his then-COS Rahm Emanuel---a G/S lobbyist in the WH)

Money Market Mutual Fund: In September 2008, the Treasury announced that it would insure the holdings of publicly offered money market mutual funds. According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), these guarantees could have potentially cost the federal government more than $3 trillion [PDF].

Public-Private Investment Fund: This joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program bought toxic assets from banks and brokerages—as much as $5 billion of assets per firm. According to SIGTARP, the government's potential exposure from the PPIF is between $500 million and $1 trillion [PDF].

TARP: As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Treasury has made loans to or investments more than 750 banks and financial institutions. $650 billion has been paid out (not including HAMP; see below). As of December 21, 2009, $117.5 billion of that has been repaid.

Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) stock purchase: The Treasury has bought $200 million in preferred stock from Fannie Mae and another $200 million from Freddie Mac [PDF] to show that they "will remain viable entities critical to the functioning of the housing and mortgage markets."

GSE mortgage-backed securities purchase: Under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Treasury may buy mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to SIGTARP, these purchases could cost as much as $314 billion ---SNIP---.

LONG READ---go to web site to read more and checkout the shocking financial charts.

SOURCE http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/behind-real-size-bailout