I've been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years (geeze!  is it really that long?).  Along the way, I've raised money for a few different companies.  Not super-ultra-large piles of money, mind you; not $billions, and certainly not $700 billion. (That's $700,000,000,000.00!  Looks even bigger that way, eh?)

But even when raising a couple million dollars for a business everyone believes would grow, my investors insisted on comprehensive analysis... use of funds, revenue projections, risk factors, etc., etc., etc.  You'd think (I certainly would) that if I were asking for a billion dollars, let alone $700 billion dollars, and that I was asking on behalf of a business that is failing, my investors would want at least the same level of analysis (and likely much, much more.)

Ah, but I am not the Bush administration.  And my investors were not my puppets.

The Bush administration does not need careful analysis.  It uses something even more compelling.  Fear.  Just tell everyone we are on the brink of <insert tragedy here e.g., WMDs, depressions, etc.> and that the president must have unbridled authority to act quickly to save our nation.

So, how did the Bush administration come up with the $700 billion figure?  As reported in Forbes.com:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Scary, huh?