Chicago-centric Bailout Math.

By Karl Klockars in Miscellaneous on Sep 30, 2008 7:20PM

Since none of us have anything better to do while waiting around for Congress to get its collective head out of its ass and crank out a bailout plan, we thought: $700 Billion is a metric shit-ton of money. What could it buy?

• 4,667 Sears Towers, at the early 70's price of $150 million to construct.
• 17,500 Chicago Spire penthouses (at $40 million per duplex)
• 50,367 sold-out Cubs playoff games (at a 2008 average of $388 per ticket)
• Over 3,000,000,000 tours at Alinea (without wine)
• 4,000,000,000 Lollapalooza weekend passes (at $175 a piece), or a little over 13 tickets for everyone in the country
• 5,343,511,450 tins of Garrett’s popcorn - CaramelCrisp and CheeseCorn! (at $131 per tin)
• 87,500,000,000 foie gras dogs from Hot Doug’s (at $8 a piece)
• 233,333,333,333 bottles of Miller High Life (at $3 a bottle and $1 left over for the jukebox)
• And how many Tootsie rolls, at about a nickel per roll? We ran out of zeroes. But it’s about 700 billion boxes of Junior Mints, which would be totally awesome.

And we thought we'd never use grade-school math skills in journalism.