The bail out cost us each $5,000

The are 143 million tax FILERS (not PAYERS) in America. 40% of them file but pay no income tax.

That leaves 86 million Americans to foot the bill. (And as far as I'm concerned those are the only people who should be allowed to vote. "No taxation without representation." What about "no representation without taxation?")

1% of tax-payers pay 40% of all taxes. So fewer than a million people (860,000) pay 1.2 trillion dollars of our 3 trillion dollar federal "budget." (And I use the word "budget" begrudgingly because that word always used to mean to be fiscally conservative to me.) That's about 1.4 billion each.

59% of us (just over 85 million) pay the remaining 60%. That's the middle class, us, who cough up 1.8 trillion a year or about $21,200 each.

And now the government (us) has just promised 700 billion dollars to bail out failing banks. What's the bet it'll be much higher than that when the final bill comes in? But for now I'll just pretend that it will "only" be 700 billion.

That means that the top 1% have just incurred an obligation of another $326,000 each and the middle class taxpayers have just been stuck with a "note" (which may never be paid back) for $5,000 each.

Now I think I'll take the rest of the day off before I start hallucinating strings of zeroes.

UPDATE: I just read that Paulson's plan could cost $1 trillion!

So I guess I'll have to multiply all the above figures by 1.4. That means we'll each be paying $7,000.