Modeled after the popular Cash for Clunkers program, which was intended to get cars with low gas mileage off the road, a federal appliance rebate program is launching in early 2010. It offers a boost to people buying energy-efficient clothes washers, refrigerators and other appliances — those that qualify for the federal "Energy Star" designation — and to manufacturers, whose sales fell 10 percent in 2008 and another 12 percent through mid-December this year.

• $3 trillion invested in Apple stock at an average price of $80 a share yields 37.5 billion shares of Apple stock. Now ignoring the affect of buying (and selling) that much stuck, you could then sell it today at say an average price of $200 a share and return $7.5 trillion to the taxpayers and/or pay off an additional $4.5 trillion in debt.


• $3 trillion invested in gold at $75 an ounce yields 45 billion ounces of gold. Again ignoring the market distortions from buying/selling that much gold, selling it today at $105 an ounce yields $4.2 trillion.


• $3 trillion invested in a Dow Jones index fund would garner a 25% gain, or an additional $750 billion.

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

WASHINGTON – What is $1.42 trillion? It's more than the total national debt for the first 200 years of the Republic, more than the entire economy of India, almost as much as Canada's, and more than $4,700 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

It's the federal budget deficit for 2009, more than three times the most red ink ever amassed in a single year.

WASHINGTON - The stimulus package is living up to its provocative name by funding a bacchanalia of behavioral sex research, a Post analysis reveals.

The next fiscal year is set to be one of the friskiest ever in the nation's science labs, as researchers probe the ins and outs of sex patterns among humans and even some of our four-legged friends.

Among the most titillating grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health are studies that would:

* Examine "barriers to correct condom use" at Indiana University, at a cost of $221,000.

* Study "hookups" among adolescents at Syracuse University. Study's cost: $219,000.

* Evaluate "drug use as a sex enhancer" in an analysis of "high-risk community sex networks" at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That study will cost $123,000.

* Study how methamphetamine, thought to produce an "insatiable need" for sex among users, "enhances the motivation for female rat sexual behavior." Some $28,000 has been awarded for the University of Maryland at Baltimore study.

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama's policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

—Greg Mankiw, via gregmankiw in this entry.

Obama and LaHood pledged that dealers will get their money back. But government data shows that many claims are still outstanding. As of Thursday, 457,000 sales worth $1.9 billion had been received. About 40 percent of those claims have been reviewed, but only $140 million, or about 7 percent of the claims dealers submitted, have actually been paid.