Let’s see: for my family, that’d be $252,630.

Via Fausta, Bloomberg.com reports:

March 31 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

Let’s just write that number out, shall we? $12,800,000,000,000.

That’d be a tax rate approaching 100%, then, if we weren’t just making our grandkids pay for it.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

Fausta notes:

And no, those numbers do not include universal health care.

I don’t want to even try to calculate the interest on that money.

One more thing, from Business Insider: what a trillion dollars looks like.

That’s a man standing next to a trillion dollars in $100 bills. Note that they’re stacked two pallets high: you’ll have to pile them up another 24 pallets high to add up to what the government has already spent, lent, or promised.

Story also found at Memeorandum, because Rule 3 is good for flowers and children and other living things. Peace.