More about the stimulus package

A couple of days ago I wrote about the proposed economic stimulus package currently being debated in the Senate, calling it ‘a complete and unmitigated disaster for the Republic‘.

That’s just been confirmed in an absolutely grotesque, appalling fashion by this article.

The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.

“We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country,” Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said on the Senate floor Feb. 3. “Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. How much from the FDIC? How much from TARP? When? Why?”

The pledges, amounting to almost two-thirds of the value of everything produced in the U.S. last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up about 18 months ago. The promises are composed of about $1 trillion in stimulus packages, around $3 trillion in lending and spending and $5.7 trillion in agreements to provide aid. The total already tapped has decreased about 1 percent since November, mostly because foreign central banks are using fewer dollars in currency-exchange agreements called swaps.

Federal Reserve lending to banks peaked at a record $2.3 trillion in December, dropping to $1.83 trillion by last week. The Fed balance sheet is still more than double the $880 billion it was in the week before Sept. 17 when it agreed to accept lower-quality collateral.

. . .

The $9.7 trillion in pledges would be enough to send a $1,430 check to every man, woman and child alive in the world. It’s 13 times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and is almost enough to pay off every home mortgage loan in the U.S., calculated at $10.5 trillion by the Federal Reserve.

Not content with Bloomberg’s calculations, I ran one of my own. $9.7 trillion, divided by the approximately 300,000,000 current residents of the USA, amounts to $32,333 for every man, woman and child in this country. That’s the amount of debt our Government wants to hang around our shoulders, each and every one of us.

Friends, if you haven’t yet called your Congressional representative and Senators about this massive boondoggle, may I urge you to please do so at once? Tell them that if they vote for it, there will be consequences for them at the next election. If we allow them to do this, we’re condemning ourselves and our posterity to a multi-generational pay-back that may well cripple this country in the long term, and even drive it into default.

We daren’t risk that . . . but unless we act now, our spineless, short-sighted, pork-wallowing politicians will dump us right into the proverbial brown substance.

Peter