$700B Goes a Long Way in Space—and on Earth

With the Treasury Department now in charge of figuring out what holes to plug with its $700 billion in bailout bucks, the San Francisco Chronicle takes a look at what else that money could do. Some highlights:

• Hire 16,062,414 public-school teachers.
• Pay the average weekly wages of 22 million Americans for one year (based on Department of Labor’s figure of $612 per week).

• Buy 3,467,063 single-family homes, based on a median price of $201,900. (For the pricier Bay Area, it would be 1,130,856 homes at $619,000 each.)
• Pay back $550 billion in outstanding student debt.
• Fund seven more years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus cover the Army’s annual budget.
• Buy 70 more Hubble-style space telescopes, or seven more international space stations.

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