the tindog coffeehouse

A couple of interesting posts from über-blog Boing Boing on the economy:

First, a sobering look at the cost of the recent government bailouts, which have exceeded $4.6 trillion if the Citigroup bailout is included.  (Original blog post here.)

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find 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
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

I’m sure there’s a lot of debate over these numbers, but at least you begin to get an idea about how much money is at stake here.

Second, Dale Dougherty has a long (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) list of why CNN has a hard time reporting on the flailing economy:

1 ) It’s not a hurricane so Anderson Cooper of CNN is unable to position himself in the middle of the storm for optimal drama. In other words, TV anchors can’t get wet and windblown, while viewers worry about their safety. The state of the economy is a disaster but not a natural disaster. Nobody’s leaving the studio for this one. There’s no place to go. …

8 ) “Why can’t this be happening to Russia or China? If it was only happening there, and not here, we would know how to cover it.” CNN would send Christiane Amanpour there. “Live from…”. We don’t have visuals like people knocking down walls, rushing into the streets or standing in lines. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is the Fall of Communism, the fall of Saddam’s statue — now these are stories of new freedoms. In America today, we have a big fall without a distinctive symbol, without a video loop, without an exotic locale. …

10 ) Lastly, the TV media is no better off than we are at understanding this complex crisis. On a gut level, viewers know what the story is, that it’s about them, their future and their children’s future. They have specific questions that are difficult to answer (see the Suze Orman blog on CNN where it is promised that she’ll answer these many, many questions; she doesn’t, of course.) and they have general worries (should I panic?) that are hard to resolve. While we try to absorb as much information as possible, we keep having the same conversation over and over:
Q. What’s going on?
A. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.