2009 Wall St Recovery, What About The Rest Of Us?

So Wall St had a very good year, but then again, they got a massive amount of money from us, the US taxpayer. How much did they get? 12.2 Trillion Dollars. Now, most of that was supposed to "trickle down" to us, but very little actually did anything for Main St. Not to shabby a deal for wrecking the world's economy.

But what did we get? Well, by the same report, we got 1.8 trillion dollars which is not exactly nothing, but it's certainly almost an order of magnitude less than Wall St, and honestly, the trend here about who gets what is very distressing. The talk in DC is to reign in the deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare. It looks like Wall St is going to pull off a double whammy - they've wiped out my home equity, crushed my pension, gutted my 401K, and now thery're going to take my Social Security and Medicare (and no, those are NOT entitlements, I've been paying for them my whole adult life.) And, there is more than a passing suspicion that even health care reform is nothing but a taxpayer bailout of failed financial companies.

Here's a couple more astute financial experts discussing our recovery - or lack of it:

Robert Reich

Joseph Stiglitz

Paul Krugman

So here's hoping that the US taxpayer gets a better deal next year than this year - because this year, we got screwed.