Some friends sent me this blog post, which shows how the current planned bailout exceeds the combined expenditure of a number of government spending events from the history of our nation. That post uses the current cost of the bailout ($4.616 trillion), which some friends have noted is closer to $7.6 trillion if one includes unspent guarantees.

These numbers are inflation adjusted, but I was still curious to see how they stacked up in terms of national GDP at their time. I wanted to know how big each event was in proportion to what our nation was producing, since this number has grown dramatically over the last century.

The figures aren’t really apples-to-apples comparisons, since all of these expenditures were multi-year affairs. Having each of them broken into expenditures per year would yield some neat %-of-GDP graphs (different bumps for each item, % of GDP on the y-axis, years on the x-axis; volume representing the total cost of an expenditure.)

In any case, here are the non-matched-fruit comparisons. As you can see, the bailout is still truly massive, on par with (but lower than) the New Deal and WWII (which I added):

Spending	Cost	Cost (Inflation-Adj.)	%GDP (Year)
Marshall Plan	$12.7 billion	$115.3 billion	5.20% (1947)
Louisiana Purchase	$15 million	$217 billion	unavailable
Race to the Moon	$36.4 billion	$237 billion	3.70% (1969)
S&L Crisis	$153 billion	$256 billion	2.79% (1989)
Korean War	$54 billion	$454 billion	14.23% (1953)
The New Deal	$32 billion	$500 billion	56.74% (1933)
Invasion of Iraq	$551 billion	$597 billion	5.03% (2003)
Vietnam War	$111 billion	$698 billion	6.78% (1975)
NASA	$416.7 billion	$851.2 billion	3.02% (2007)
WWII	$288 billion	$3,290 billion	129.09% (1945)
2008 Credit Crisis Bailout	$4,616 billion	$4,616 billion	32.65% (2008)

The spreadsheet is here.

Note: WWII cost figure from the National D-Day Museum

Related Posts:

• Downward Spiral (October, 2008)
• Toyota Kicking Some Major Ass (February, 2006)
• The Money Man’s Burden (September, 2006)
• Uprooting Nationalism (October, 2005)
• WattzOn: Personal Energy Profile (December, 2008)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under doomsaying, economics, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.