Money doesn’t have to be boring! Each week, CreditBloggers.com takes a look at the lighter side of the personal finance world in a series called Funny Money Friday.
“Halloween’s still weeks away,
But tricks of finance start today:
Some get gift bags in the billions,
Others, pennies (mere civilians).
Whether treat’s insane or small,
Depends if street is Main- or Wall-.”– Kevin Pierce, News and Verse
Here’s the way the bailout will work: “A failed president and a failed Congress invest $700 billion of your money in failed businesses,” explains Jay Leno. “Believe me, this can’t fail.”
In care you’re wondering, your share of the $700 billion bailout comes to about $2,300, or as Jon Stewart put it the other night in a segment he called “Debt to America,” $700 billion would “buy every single American 2000 McDonald’s apple pies.”
“In $100 bills, it’s about 15 million pounds of money. That’s almost as heavy as all the steel and iron in the Eiffel Tower,” explain Addison Wiggin and Ian Mathias in Agora Financial’s 5 Min. Forecast. “Laid end to end in $1 bills, it’s around 70 million miles… enough to touch Mars most times during its elliptical orbit around the sun each year.”
Slate’s Explainer,$700 billion is equal to about 12 Bill Gateses.” For you movie-goers, she adds, Titanic, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, raked in $1.8 billion from the worldwide box office, so James Cameron would have to make roughly 381 Titanic-sized blockbusters to settle Wall Street’s debts.”
In case you’re wondering what else we can do with $700 billion, Ruth Conniff suggests on The Progressive’s Web site that we “compare the bailout with the pricetags on a few other items deemed unaffordable by the Administration and Congress.” Her picks include:
- $100 billion to cover all the health care costs for all the uninsured in the USA.
- $35 billion for universal pre-school.
- $50 billion for free college education for everyone.
- $500 billion for total energy independence, with a shift to renewables within the next ten years.
What would you like to see us do with the $700 billion? What’s the best joke you’ve seen on this subject?
Nancy Castleman – Co-author of "Invest in Yourself: Six Secrets to a Rich Life" and founder of Good Advice Press. Nancy has spent the last 24 years teaching people how to get out of debt, save money, and live better on less. She writes on all these subjects for CreditBloggers.com.
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