The bank bailout was around $700 billion. We gave that money to banks because they foreclosed on too many houses and couldn't sell them all.
Maybe the crazy Rent is Too Damn High guy would have been just smart enough to realize it would be smarter to spend the $700 Billion to buy the unsellable houses and then give the houses to poor people instead of giving the money to rich people and letting the houses continue to be vacant and unsellable.
I tried to look up exactly how much the bank bailout was and I got figures between $30 billion and $4,000 billion. I went with the offical number, $700B.
Bailout - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bank bailout could cost $4 trillion - Jan. 27, 2009