Bailouts now surpass govt. expenditures on all U.S. wars combined

Scott Ritsema
CIVICS NEWS.com
January 7, 2009



The U.S. Government has seized a tremendous amount of wealth from productive citizens in the form of military spending during its short history. Massive military budgets have enriched and empowered the state and its allied interests consistently since 1941. An insane amount of money has been spent killing civilians and soldiers alike, and propping up the American imperial system. This is definitely not the humble republic envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and other founders, who believed that standing armies were the second greatest threat to republican liberty.

Warfare is notorious for being the most ravenous tax-eating enterprise to which the state dedicates its energies. Well ... now meet the new kid on the block--a form of government profligacy that has surpassed all the military spending in Ameircan history: BAILOUTS. CNS News reports:

The total value of the bailouts undertaken by the federal government in 2008 now exceeds the combined cost of every major war the United States has ever engaged in, according to a comparison of war costs calculated by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the value of the bailouts as calculated by Bloomberg News or Bianco Research.

According to CRS, all major U.S. wars (including such events as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but not the invasion of Panama or the Kosovo War), cost a total of $7.2 trillion in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars.

According to Bloomberg, the federal government has made commitments worth a total of $8.5 trillion in the bailouts of 2008. That includes actual expenditures as well as loan and asset guarantees.

Bianco Research puts the total value of the bailouts at $8.7 trillion.

The $296 billion spent on World War II, America’s most expensive war, would be $4.1 trillion adjusted to today’s dollars, according to the CRS report from June.

Recall that Jefferson considered standing armies to be the second greatest threat to liberty. What do you suppose he considered to be the greatest threat to liberty? Could Jefferson have foreseen our financial crisis? Could he have predicted that government would come to exist only for the benefit of the bankers and government-tied corporations, all facilitated through a central bank? Thomas Jefferson:

The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution. . . . I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.

Related: Bailouts cost more than twice as much as US History's biggest expenditures