October 21, 2009
Speaking of government wasting our money, looks like that bailout is going to cost us a little bit more than expected.
In more bad news, CNNMoney.com is reporting that Neil Barofsky, who oversees the TARP program, has reported that the TARP bailout is going to end up costing taxpayers a lot more than the government let on:
The $700 billion bailout will ultimately cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but the government stands to lose much more than the money it’s pouring into companies.
Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for Treasury’s financial sector rescue, wrote in a report released Wednesday that the bailout has several hidden costs.
One is the hard cost of borrowing money to fund the rescues of banks and other companies. The others are, according to Barofsky, less tangible but no less important: The danger that comes with rewarding companies that took excessive risk, and the loss of the government’s credibility with taxpayers.
“You can’t just think of this program in terms of dollars and cents,” Barofsky told CNNMoney. “We try to bring attention to these other costs, which have the potential to dwarf the monetary loss in dollars.”
To be sure, the monetary loss will likely be substantial: Barofsky cites the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Troubled Asset Relief Program will ultimately cost taxpayers $159 billion.
But Barofsky focuses his report, a quarterly update to Congress and the public, on what he identifies as the unseen costs and risks of TARP.
You mean the all-knowing elite who ruin rule the world from Washington, DC have no clue what the eff they’re doing and what the actual costs will be? There’s a shocker! This is what I have been trying to get at when I say we can’t trust any of their estimates. The proponents of these bills have an interest in downplaying the costs, and the opponents of the bill have an interest in exaggerating the costs. Even if they knew the actual costs of their policies, which I’m pretty sure they don’t because I believe them to be self-interested morons, they wouldn’t tell us.
The problem is, most Americans don’t get this. People still think of politicians as “civil servants.” These people aren’t civil servants. They aren’t making sacrifices in their personal lives to benefit their country and constituents. They’re making their country and constituents make sacrifices to benefit their personal lives. Even if that’s not how they start when they first run or get into office, that’s how they’ll all end up: self-interested scumbags out to preserve their power any way they can. The only people they serve is themselves. What’s so civil about that?
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.