To Put Things In Perspective

According to Neil Barofsky (Inspector General for TARP), the overall cost of the 'bailout' could be as high as $23.7 trillion (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM)

Now we've all heard a lot of numbers tossed around lately and they tend to lose their meaning without something to scale them by. Let's remedy that, shall we? The GDP of the US last year was a touch over $14 trillion. China's was $7.8 trillion last year (talking about purchasing power parity here, not nominal). So that's saying that if you take our GDP from last year and combine it with China's (the two largest economies in the world), we STILL haven't paid off the bailout. Think about that..... where do we expect this money to come from? *Cue Jeopardy theme song*