Bailouts will cost Taxpayers Trillions of Dollars

The U.S. Government is undertaking an unprecedented and very expensive effort to rescue the economy and prevent an economic depression.

CNN Money has added up the dollars allocated to the economic rescue to date; and, with the Fed's addition of $1.1 Trillion, we are looking at an allocation of $13.5 trillion dollars, of which approximately $2.2 Trillion has actually been spent.

Some economists estimate that it will cost double what has already been allocated to save the economy.

For additional details about where the money went, click on the plus signs in the chart below.

The link to CNN's chart can be found here: http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/bailout_scorecard/index.html

Today's trivia question - if we divided $13.5 Trillion by the adult population in America, how much is each taxpayer's share?

Hints for answering today's trivia question:

A trillion is a thousand billion, which would be written as a one with 12 zeros:

Let's say the population of the U.S. is approximately 250 million. If we divide $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion dollars) by 250,000,000, (million people) we get $4,000. That's $4,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States.

As of February 2009, the United States has an estimated resident population of 306 million. People under 20 years of age make up over a quarter of the U.S. population (27.6%), and people age 65 and over made up one-eighth (12.6%) in 2007. The national median age was 36.7 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States