Consider the $700 billion bailout.

We supposedly ponied up this money so the country wouldn't go bankrupt. But was this really the best solution? There are around 200,000,000 adults in the United States, and if you divide 700 billion by 200 million, you get 3,500 bucks for every adult, which is enough to make anybody solvent, even me. Plus, a movie about a Chihuahua made $23 million in just one weekend, which means that if the government made a Chihuahua movie every weekend, we'd be out of the economic crapper in no time.

Yo quiero Taco Bailout.

Then the government lent a company named AIG $37.8 billion, after giving it a line of credit for $85 billion. I'm no math whiz, but I'm not sure this was a great investment. If somebody already owed me $85 billion, I wouldn't lend them more money until they gave me back a billion or so, unless they threw in something to sweeten the deal, like a new puppy or maybe some fleece socks.

I'm not even sure what AIG stands for. American Insurance Giant? Or maybe Avarice In General?

I confess that I don't understand where the government got the 700 billion in the first place. I know it came from us taxpayers, but taxes aren't due until April 15 and I thought we were already running on empty. So where did they get the money from, and so quick? When I need to find dough fast, I go digging in old purses and wallets. And when I'm really desperate, I hit the couch cushions. So I'm guessing the government has one really big sofa. Or maybe several hundred sofas.

Like 700 billion sofas.

Next I read that the Federal Reserve cut the prime lending rate by half a percent, but that makes no sense to me. A half a percent is, like, nothing. If I gave you half a percent of a sandwich, you wouldn't even have enough to get stuck between your teeth.

For another example, take my body-fat percentage. After weeks of going to the gym and sweating like a farm animal, I'm finally down from 31 percent to 30 percent. In other words, I lost a full 1 percent - no fraction, the real deal. Of course, I celebrated with chocolate cake. But for half a percent, I wouldn't bother finding the cake knife.

And how about the stock market, which goes up and down like crazy? The stock graphs in the newspaper used to look like EKG charts, but now they look like lie-detector charts.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

Stocks are up 180 points one day, then down 400 the next. I don't understand much about stocks, but I do know about points. In fact, I'm a point expert, having accumulated 3,738 points on my American Express card. American Express points used to look like a joke compared with American stock-exchange points, but I can always swap my American Express points for a vacuum cleaner. Try getting a vacuum cleaner with your Lehman Bros. points.

You got hosed.

And it sucks.

It turns out that all of the countries of the world cooperated to solve this economic crisis. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the central banks of Canada and Sweden all cut their lending rates, like a big financial ring-around-the-rosy. Switzerland and the Bank of Japan joined hands, too.

Still it didn't help. How do we know? The Fear Index remained unchanged. In fact, at one point it reached its highest level since the 1987 crash.

I'm not making this up.

There is such a thing called the Fear Index, and you can guess what it measures. I did some reading, but couldn't find out the actual ratings on the Fear Index. I'm guessing it goes from 1 to 10, with 1 being Piece of Cake and 10 being Urinary Incontinence.

Even so, some people can look on the bright side. One hedge-fund manager was quoted as saying, "I do think that stocks are getting extremely cheap." And another advised his clients to buy, saying that fear and panic are "what drives markets to attractive levels."

Huh?

But people like me are hoping for the best, too. In time, what goes down must come up, which is a scientific fact I learned from my own personal history. Every time I lose weight, I end up gaining it back again. I can't believe the stock market is all that different.

Nature prevails, and so does chocolate cake.

Take heart.