I'll admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to when they formally named the government bailout TARP (for Troubled Assets Relief Program), but the name now has me thinking. If we'd taken the $700 billion and bought actual tarps - like this one - we could make one big tarp that would be 358,700,642,791,551 square miles in area. That much tarp could cover the Earth, which has a surface area of 196,935,000 square miles, 1,821,416 times. Or a little less when you consider you're wrapping a sphere with a huge square tarp. There's bound to be some waste.

As much as I'd like to avoid a depression, there's part of me that wishes we'd bought the big ass tarp.

(It should go without saying that someone should check my math.)

UPDATE! I went back and checked my own math, and found that I'd gotten it horrifically wrong. What I wound up calculating was the area for a tarp that would have 1 billion of those tarps per side, rather than one big tarp made up of a billion of these smaller tarps.

So I went back and did the math on making a tarp out of a billion of these tarps (actually about 50,000 fewer, in order to keep it a square). Said tarp would have a side of 3, 162, 200 feet, which results in an area of... 358,681.21 square miles. That would cover Texas with room to spare, which I'm sure would please a few people.