As if $700 billion weren’t an incomprehensible enough sum on its own, that widely repeated figure only represents Henry Paulson’s personal stash of get-out-of-debt-free cards. The total tab on the array of taxpayer-financed Wall Street bailouts presently contemplated is likely to be closer to $1.8 trillion by the reckoning of CNBC, whose highly recommended estimate includes a rundown of the additional bailout billions.
The following list of things you can buy with a trillion dollars is cadged from the invaluable Undernews.
One trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is enough money:
To buy everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo (pictured above; base couple starts at $186,900).
To buy 88,052 394-foot custom mega yachts; enough to stretch around one-fourth of the world.
To buy everyone living in Belize and Malta a Manhattan apartment.
[List continues after the jump.]
To get half of the Democratic Party into a fundraiser for Barack Obama at the $28,500 admission price.
To give one out of every two men in the United States a Men’s Presidential Rolex watch.
To buy every woman in the United States a Tiffany Diamond Starfish Pendant.
To get two Mitsubishi 73″ HDTVs for every household in America.
To buy four copies of The Office: Season Four on DVD, for every person on earth.
To send everybody in America on an all-inclusive vacation to Tahiti (and some people can stay a few extra days).
$1 trillion is enough money for everyone in Buffalo, N.Y., to buy their own 65-acre island in Panama.
This is how much the government is going to cost you (roughly $3,278 for every man, woman and child in the United States).













2 Comments »
Comment posted September 23, 2008 @ 2:14 am
And where is the call to investigate who is responsible for it all??? The media silence is deafening. Senator Chris Dodd Chairman D-CT Senate Banking Committee, Rep Barney Frank D-MA chairman House Finance Committee, first need to resign then be investigated for corruption. Both of these gilded clowns took millions of dollars from financial institutions (Bear Stearns, Merryl Lynch, Lehman Bros, Countrywide, to name a few) and when there were questions being raised over three years ago regarding improprieties at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, calls for an investigation were turned down by both of these individuals. They are guilty of taking bribes in my opinion and need to be investigated and if found guilty jailed and stripped of their pensions and any other benefits attained while serving in Congress. Reference: http://www.opensecrets.org/
Comment posted September 23, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
Pay off more than a third of all outstanding consumer debt, which the Federal Reserve says now stands at $2.5 trillion.
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