What to do with $800 billion

I looked at that number and did some quick math in my head. Eight hundred billion dollars. Three hundred million citizens. A bailout doesn’t make sense to me when you could just split that up evenly among all the residents of the United States. What is that? A hundred thousand dollars per person? Sign me up!

I’m bad at math, I guess. That actually comes out to about $2700 a person. That probably wouldn’t stimulate the economy a whole lot. Even if you just give it to non-dependents (let’s estimate that’s about 50% of the population; I could be way off) that’s maybe $5000-ish per person. Still not that significant.

So what do you do with the money? Give it to people who can stimulate the economy. Who is that? Scott Adams says says it’s the morons, and I have to agree with him:

Our past economic booms depended heavily on morons. Those wonderful stimulators of the economy had to buy stock in perpetually unprofitable tech companies, or invest in real estate after it was clearly overpriced. Every economic boom is powered by the clueless.

I haven’t kept up much with where the money is supposedly going, but I hear rumblings of “really stupid places.” Maybe the government does have a clue what they’re doing after all.