When they get into trouble they are more expensive to bail out.

Nancy Folbre writes in Economix in the Times:

In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available, TANF spending on cash assistance (not including child care or other subsidies) came to $4.5 billion. Total commitments to TARP since September 2008 come to $700 billion. So one year of TANF spending equals less than 1 percent of TARP. Citibank alone received $25 billion, five times the cash transferred to mothers and children receiving public assistance in 2007.

Here’s a more specific comparison. Top executives of banks bailed out this year — about 600 guys — received an estimated $1.6 billion in bonuses in 2007. That’s a little over a third of what 1.6 million families got in cash from TANF in that year.

TANF isn’t the only form of assistance to the poor that we regularly provide and TARP isn’t the only form of assistance to banks and insurance companies delivered this year. It’s difficult to figure out exactly what should be added up on both sides to compare welfare to rich and poor.

Robert Rector and Katharine Bradley of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, estimate that federal welfare spending amounted to $491 billion in fiscal 2008. (They don’t explain what specific programs they included in this estimate, and I’ll try to unpack it in a future post.) Even their extremely high estimate remains far below estimates of the total of $2.5 trillion spent on financial bailouts this year. The libertarian Cato Institute often emphasizes the issue of corporate welfare, but it’s remained remarkably quiet so far on the topic of bailouts.

Wonks Anonymous stands by his previous assertion. It would be cheaper to send them all to Antigua with piles of monopoly money, pay their room and board and let them swindle each other to their hearts content.

In the meantime Wonks Anonymous believes that if they are paying only 74% of total income taxes, while doubling or tripling the deficit, they should consider themselves lucky.