My Economic Bailout Plan

I was having a discussion today about the bank bailout plan which would give banks more than $700 billion to correct the mistakes they made. Someone said that the government should take that money and give it to the American public, claiming that each American could get $100,000 to $500,000.

I'm no math genius so I thought the figure could be right. I'm not quick enough to check something like that in my head so I waited until I got home to check it on the calculator.

My first question was how much is $700 billion? First, your average everyday calculator does not have enough digits on it to enter $700 billion, or $700,000,000,000. So I tried my "scientific" calculator. That does not work either. Luckily, I have a graphing calculator that I bought for a statistics class and that does take all those digits. (I suppose it would have worked on the computer calculator but I didn't try it.)

So if you take $700 billion and divide it by the population of the U.S., or about 300 million, that gives every man, woman and child about $2,333.

Now how much was that economic stimulus check Bush gave us? About $1,200 for married couples and $600 for singles.

So let's say we take that $700 billion and put it into an economic stimulus package. Let's split it up by households so each household gets a share. There are about 100 million households in the U.S. so that would be about $7,000 per household.

I think I could stimulate the economy with $7,000. Screw the bankers who messed up the whole system to begin with. Let me fix the economy!

The banks are probably not going to help us out of the situation anyway. An article I read today says that the banks are just going to use the money to acquire smaller banks who get wiped out by the recession, not to give the people loans which is what it was supposed to do. Instead, the banks are padding themselves in case the recession gets worse.

And then there's the automakers begging for a bailout! They want $25 billion. They've invested so heavily in mass consumption of non-renewable resources that they've finally gotten themselves into a bind when the flow of those resources starts to dry up. Maybe they could have diversified a little better. Here's your bailout - you learned a valuable business lesson, don't make the mistake again.

And according to the above article, the automakers don't even know what they want to do with the money. Let me guess, pay the inflated salaries of everyone in the auto industry from the overpaid CEOs to the schmuck who gets $76 an hour to screw on lug nuts all day.

Yeah, so let's throw more than $725 BILLION dollars at the problem. In layman's terms, $700 billion is nine times the amount we spent on education in 2007, enough to buy the entire healthcare industry, $140 billion more than we've spent on the Iraq War, $200 billion more than the entire interstate highway program used in the last 51 years, and the list goes on. Here's a cool site that tells you how much $700 billion really is... enough to buy every man, woman and child in the U.S. 4,666 McDonalds Apple Pies at 50 cents each.