Scared Yet?

After the federal government recently decided to guarantee $306 billion of Citigroup debt, the total cost of the financial crisis now exceeds $4.61 trillion. (Bloomberg calculates the amount that the American taxpayer is now on the hook for is actually $7.76 trillion, or $24,000 for every man, woman and child in this country.) To put those figures in greater perspective, the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – COMBINED:

• Marshall Plan -- Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase -- Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon -- Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• Savings and Loan Crisis -- Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War -- Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• New Deal -- Cost: $32 billion (estimated), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (estimated)
• Iraq War -- Cost: $551 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War -- Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA Budget -- Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion
  

Total: $3.93 trillion

That total is approximately $687 billion less than the cost of the financial crisis to this point. The only single event in U.S. history which even comes close to matching the cost of the current financial crisis is World War II. The original cost for World War II was $288 billion and the inflation adjusted cost is $3.6 trillion. The more than $4.61 trillion committed so far to the financial crisis is almost $1 trillion dollars ($979 billion) greater than the entire cost of World War II incurred by the U.S.