Number Crunching

I was pointed to this blog entry today putting the credit crunch bail out in the States in perspective alongside other big spends.

• 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 billion¹
• 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

That's an inflation adjusted total of $3.92 trillion.

For comparison the US bail out this time around currently stands at $4.6165 trillion.

As he says the only event in US history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II which cost $288 billion, or $3.6 trillion inflation adjusted.

The same is true here mind you: apparently the debt we're running up this time around is twice what we borrowed to win World War I. The only saving grace is that this time around we might, in theory, get some of it back rather than pissing it away in the fields of Belgium.

1. This is the one that gets me: it's the second time I've seen that recently and I'd not realised until then quite how insanely expensive that enterprise was.