Originally Posted by Mister Jalopy @ boingboing.net

So, I had an expensive lunch today. $10, plus $2 worth of iced tea and a $3 tip. But! Two kebabs, a pile of rice, a Greek salad and two lamb chops! It was late, I completed a big and miserable project and wanted to treat myself. Besides, who has lamb chops for lunch?! Anyway, back to the approximating. My lunch was about $15. AIG's bail-out loan from the Fed is estimated at $85 billion. So, that is about 5.6 billion kebab, lamb chop, Greek salad, rice and iced tea lunches.

My beloved San Fernando Valley has about 1.8 million people and, if it was a city, it would be the 6th most populous in the nation. If I got a $85 billion dollar loan from the federal government, I could buy about 3000 lunches for everybody in the San Fernando Valley. From the equine estates of Chatsworth to the Tarzana chicken coop of Mark Frauenfelder, from the handmade carnitas of Carrillo's in San Fernando to the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. I could buy 3000 lunches per resident. And let's face it, with two kebabs and two lamb chops, that is a dinner. So, an extremely hearty lunch, a sturdy dinner and I will add two egg McMuffins for breakfast, so, let's see, that would raise the per day costs per resident to about $33. Perhaps that won't get you far in London, but in Los Angeles, that is an ample per diem!

At $33 per day, I could buy every resident in the Valley breakfast, lunch and dinner for, hmm, about 3 years? Or I could just buy everybody a new $50,000 Mercedes!