Wait, Why Is It $700 Billion Exactly?

Congress is burning the midnight oil negotiating over the bailout package, and I bet you dollar to donuts it'll happen soon. But have you ever wonder how they arrived at the magic number of $700 billion figure for the bailout? The answer may surprise you:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Whaaaa? Not based on any particular data point? Then why not make it $888 billion - it's catchier and plus 8 is a lucky number.

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i could be wrong on this one, but i read that they chose $700 billion because that's the max amount allowed to be spent without being questioned by the federal reserve.. or something like that...

even if 95% of us are questioning it....
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apparently if they chose 800 it was "too close to a Trillion" and wouldn't fly
it's a comedy show, and you are both the audience AND the sucker...
lay your money down!
(oh, and hurry up and give it to us! Oh, and, no, we don't want any oversight - in eight months when the whole thing tanks, we'll have funneled the money out to the rich guys again, and the country goes under
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I believe the number is actually about a trillion if you count the other smaller bailouts. $85 billion for AIG, and $200 billion for fannie/freddie. That puts us just at $985 billion (that we're undoubtedly borrowing ourselves).

One thing that stuck out at the debate was that earmarks make up a total of $18 billion per year, so if we arbitrarily add that number, we can just barely top the big $1,000,000,000,000. Hooray, US! They say our education system sucks, but we can count reeeeeeeeaaaallly high.
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Mooncake (love your handle BTW), Hahahaha! That can't be right! If it is, it's hilarious. Like declaring 15 exemptions on your income tax, because if you declare 16, they look at it.
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Uh yeah, sorry. That was from someone claiming the same thing on the AIG bailout. I estimate 200 million voters divided into 7 billion to be about 3500 before tax, if they tax. Sorry again, long day!
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To clarify, there's a claim making the email rounds that if the AIG bailout was divided among the estimated 200 million taxpayers, it would be 425,000...when in fact that math was way wrong, and included 3 too many zeroes.

Also, while the 3500 bucks may not be as desirable, if each citizen got that as a check in the mail, I would think they would pour it back into their credit balances, make mortgage payments, and buy products. The money still funnels to the rich bankers, without the temptation for them to just pocket it, and leave us debtors in the dark. The Paulson plan is to simply hand them the cash.
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Well yeah, it's always easy to be generous with other people's money. I heard today that the value of the bad mortgages was around $100 billion. So where was the rest of the money going to go?
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