Krugman touched on one point, which is the real tiger in the room: The bailing out of the financial institutions is going to cost a lot of money, possibly as much as the Iraq War. Bear Stears was trading at $30 per share on Friday, yet JP Morgan bought them out over the weekend for $2 per share. So either Bear Stearns lost 93% of its value in just over a day or we, the taxpayers, are footing much of the bill.
Maybe three trillion dollars, possibly more, to bail out the financial institutions. Three trillion dollars for the Iraq War. And yet, Bush thinks that cutting taxes for the rich and giving tax breaks to companies like Exxon/Mobil, which has booked profits of ten billion a quarter for the last two years are good ideas.
You can forget the following things taking place in the next decade or more:
The Federal government helping to pay for renovating bridges and highways, which is why you will seen a widespread return of toll roads.
Federal involvement in education. There will be no money for Federal programs, so states will start telling the Department of Education to bugger off. Higher education will slowly drift back to what it was before the Second World War- a perk for the rich.
A permanent base on the Moon.
Americans going to Mars.
Any meaningful fix of Social Security.
In this country, unless you are wealthy, life is going to get harder, as wages remain flat yet the costs of fuel and food are skyrocketing. If you are on the bottom third of the economic ladder, your life is going to become much harder, grindingly so. There will be no real social safety net.
So if your life gets real sucky over the next several years, if you watch the value of the one large asset you have (your home) evaporate, and if it finally hits you that your children and grandchildren are going to be faced with much rougher lives than you and your parents had, and if you want to gaze on the faces of the two criminally negligent men who made this all happen, here you go:
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