Crunching the numbers

It's hard to get your head around $700 billion.

The Bush administration wants to use that much money to bail out the troubled financial industry, thereby saving the economy from another Great Depression. The administration says the taxpayer money would buy up problem mortgages and much of it would eventually get paid back. Hahaha.

The folks at the Florida Sun-Sentinel did the math, and found that this is what you could get for $700 billion:

You could literally buy the world a Coke. One two-liter bottle per person per week for a year.

Or, you could buy a 60-inch high-def TV for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

Or, you could buy braces for the teeth of everyone in Great Britain -- and France.

Or, you could buy all 32 NFL teams -- 27 times.

Or, you could provide Mac laptops to every school-age child in the U.S. -- seven laptops per kid.

Best option of all: You could buy a year's worth of gasoline for every person in the U.S.

Now that might boost the economy.