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.
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).
Comment