Ach said he already has spent more than $1 million and expects to spend "something past eight figures" to take the channel to a national satellite feed, something he hopes to accomplish in the next year.
He acknowledged that some "sold poor stuff for a large price," but that it was a great comfort to many to have a chance to spend something, when they did not know what to do with their salaries.
Yet despite being a welfare case, the company is allowed to spend something like $400 million over 20 years to indulge its vanity.
"We are looking at China's pile of reserves with envy, and hope the Chinese are willing to spend something on us," said Paul de Grauwe, an economics professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium and an adviser to the European Commission.
"When you get a windfall, you always have to spend something on enjoying yourself," he said, "but I probably wouldn't have spent as much on the car from a percentage basis".
Whether they can get the right personnel will depend on not just Randy Lerner's willingness to spend – something Garde sounds reasonably confident about – but also their prospects of survival.
Expect to spend something like 65% of revenue on operating expenses, including 25% on labor, 15% on marketing, 8% on food and utilities and 4% on insurance.
I recently read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, where he says that you have to spend something like 10,000 hours doing something before you master it.
"Britain will spend something like a decade inching to some sort of new economic and political settlement," he says.
All told, wealthy liberals spent something close to $200 million in an effort to oust George W. Bush in 2004, setting an entirely new standard for outside spending.
