Some numbers of interest - bail outs, foreign aid, saving wall street, saving the world

700,000,000,000 - approximate number of US dollars proposed in the bail out bill (link).

0.7 - percentage of GDP agreed upon in 1970 to be set aside for foreign aid. Often sited as an appropriate funding goal to help meet the UN's Millenium Development Goals. (link)

0.16: actual GDP percentage of aid given by the US in 2007. (link)

7.5: approximate number of years of possible US aid at the full 0.7% benchmark if the one time $700 billion bail out was used for this purpose. (link)

2015: the end of which will be roughly seven and a half years from now, and also the target year for the Millenium Development Goals. (link)

You can add if you think of any interesting stats that keep it going

More like this

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine focused on the income gap, which included Lauren Greenfield's latest documentary pieces on Kids and Money. They're nothing magical--just a straightforward look at L.A.'s teenagers, who represent the demographic with the largest spending power in the U.S…
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about good old 0.7%. This is the hallmark figure suggested by Pearson as a target for foreign aid to developing nations. In other words, the main idea is that wealthy nations do something nice and set aside about 0.7% of the gross domestic product, so that the…
700,000,000,000 6,850,000,000 The lower number is the requested NSF budget for 2009, which represents an inconceivably bold 14% increase over 2008, in an attempt to get the budget back on the widely agreed upon track called for by the American Competitiveness Initiative. The actual 2009 budget…
If you're working on a major global problem like poverty, it's important to have goals to work towards. Back in 2000, world leaders came together and adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which commits to reducing extreme poverty and sets out a series of goals to be reached by 2015.…