Nothing to Show for It

TARP I and TARP II combined add up to 700 billion dollars in government expense. Now... 700 billion is a big number. Its so big in fact that its hard for the average human to grasp. They hear 700 billion but their brain just classifies that as a really big number. If you'd said 600 million their brain would've done the same thing. There's no difference without scale.

With that in mind... I want to show you some scale.

Here are some construction projects... and examples of what we could've done with that 700 billion.

* Taipei 101 is the worlds tallest completed building. It cost 1.8 billion to build. We could've built 388 of them.

* Wembley Stadium is the most expensive stadium ever built. It cost 1.5 billion. We could've built 466 of them.

* The new Cowboys Stadium in Texas costs 1 billion. We could've put 14 of them in each and every state of the union.

* Burg Al Arab is the third tallest hotel building in the world and worlds only 7-Star hotel. We could've built 1,076 of them and spread them all over the interstate system of America. There would be 21 of them in Iowa alone.

* Boston's Big Dig cost 14 billion. We reproduced it in the 50 largest cities in America.

* CERN... the scientific marvel... cost 6 billion. We could've built 116 of them.

* NASA requested 3.6 billion to send men to the Moon and then on to Mars. That is one half of one percent of the cost of the TARP program. Sorry... no picture of this program. We couldn't afford to do it.