Large round numbers are always the foundation of a big lie.
Kinda like when Henry Paulson told us he needed $700,000,000,000 to use carte blanche so he could save the financial system. From Forbes Magazine:(emphasis mine)
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. "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."