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Stimulus, Illustrated

It's difficult to visualize a million dollars, much less a million million dollars.  But that's the true threshold cracked by the "$825" billion "stimulus" bill, when you include $347 billion in estimated interest costs associated with the incremental borrowing required.

So how big is the resulting $1.2 trillion spending package?  Big enough to dwarf any government program in history, even after adjusting for inflation.  It's bigger than the New Deal and the Iraq War combined.  The interest alone will be costlier than the Louisiana Purchase or going to the moon.  The $18 billion in bonuses paid legally by private Wall Street firms in 2008 - decried by the President as "shameful" - is vanishingly small in comparison (smaller even than the bill's incremental food stamps expenditures).

The only relatively modest component of the spending bonanza is the money tagged for infrastructure and energy efficiency (the ostensibly stimulative part), which accounts for less than 14% of the total.

Feast your eyes on the ghastly enormity.

(Data includes estimates from Bianco Research, via The Big Picture.)

Update:  As requested in the comments, here's a higher-res version of the image.

Related:
What Else Can We Get For Our $1.2 Trillion?
Stimulus, Illustrated - Part II

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Comments

Stimulus, Illustrated

It's difficult to visualize a million dollars, much less a million million dollars.  But that's the true threshold cracked by the "$825" billion "stimulus" bill, when you include $347 billion in estimated interest costs associated with the incremental borrowing required.

So how big is the resulting $1.2 trillion spending package?  Big enough to dwarf any government program in history, even after adjusting for inflation.  It's bigger than the New Deal and the Iraq War combined.  The interest alone will be costlier than the Louisiana Purchase or going to the moon.  The $18 billion in bonuses paid legally by private Wall Street firms in 2008 - decried by the President as "shameful" - is vanishingly small in comparison (smaller even than the bill's incremental food stamps expenditures).

The only relatively modest component of the spending bonanza is the money tagged for infrastructure and energy efficiency (the ostensibly stimulative part), which accounts for less than 14% of the total.

Feast your eyes on the ghastly enormity.

(Data includes estimates from Bianco Research, via The Big Picture.)

Update:  As requested in the comments, here's a higher-res version of the image.

Related:
What Else Can We Get For Our $1.2 Trillion?
Stimulus, Illustrated - Part II

---

Click here to subscribe to the FlipSheet, an investment newsletter for politically turbulent markets.