President Bush asked for a little money today. Here are some ways to put that into perspective. I use the very handy data from the census bureau for these calculations.
- He recommends spending ~$2300 for every person in the United States.
- According to the census, there are about 33 million Americans earning less than $50K per year with mortgages. Assuming a 10% default rate (this is huge) and an average $92,000 mortgage, we could cover all defaulted loans for $303Billion.
- There are 6,450,000 Americans living below the poverty and holding mortgages. Their median mortgage (sorry, I don’t have the average) is $21,390. We could roughly pay off all of these people’s homes for only $137Billion.