I expect more

From Mother Jones Magazine than this bizarre list of things in the February 2010 issue that that the 14 billion bailout could have been spent on. Aside from it being totally unclear what the math behind the numbers might possibly be, I really had to read it multiple times to see if the author intended to be satirical, or at least tongue in cheek. But given the article it appears at the end of, I don't think this is the case.

WHAT ELSE COULD $14 TRILLION BUY?

That's the real size of the bailout.

What else could it buy?

—Marian Wang

10 years of vaccines for kids in 117 countries
$110 billion

10 years of $10,000 bonuses for all US public school teachers
$318 billion

Sending all 2009 US high school grads to private college
$347 billion

Doubling US spending on HIV/AIDS and cancer research for 20 years
$493 billion

10 years of CO2 offsets for all Americans
$559 billion

Meeting UN anti-poverty goals by 2015
$757 billion

20 years of universal preschool in US
$860 billion

Buying a house for every homeless American
$878 billion

10 years of helping developing countries deal with the effects of climate change
$2 trillion

Buying the world an iPhone 3GS
$2 trillion

10 years of private health insurance for uninsured Americans
$2.2 trillion

Paying off 1/3 of US home mortgages
$3.5 trillion

Total: $14 trillion

Some are just patently silly, like the iPhone thing. But many are causes that, as G pointed out, are classical liberal favorites, like paying teachers more. Why use the buzzword "bonus," though? How is "private" health insurance the goal, rather than universal, single payer medicine? Which 1/3 of mortgages? 1/3 of every mortgage, or a mortgage payoff lottery where 1/3 of entrants win? Why on earth is private college the goal, rather than properly funding state schools? (And I say this as a graduate of a private college and a private law school.)

Buying a house for every homeless American? What suburban shithole sprawl is going to accommodate all those single family houses? And does this mean the approximately 123,000 chronically homeless? (Which would mean that we'd have about 7.1 million each to spend on those houses.) Or the approximately 3 million Americans who are temporarily homeless, housing insecure, or chronically homeless in any given year? (Which would mean about 272k per house.)

While I appreciate the illustration of what a corporate welfare boondoggle most of the bailout was, can you see the problem with such sillyass "statistics"?