The Democrats have done it again. How clueless care they? Their reaction to being bullied into bailing out the catastrophic failures of Reaganomics after the pyramid scheme collapsed and most of the treasure has been looted by thieves who still get rewarded for their theft with golden parachutes is to tack additional spending (generational borrowing, since we don't actually have the money) onto the plan to give a quick shot in the arm of the middle class (to pick up a few votes presumably).
I have not heard one use of the word "oversight" yet in all the interviews with Dodd and the others. How can this be happening? There will never be a better time to leverage reforms as we go - to make attacking the root causes of this problem part of the conditions of a bailout. Yet not one word in that direction!
Here are some ideas that must be done immediately and tied to any bailout:
Raise top tier income taxes and capital gains taxes and estate taxes back to where they were in the 1950's. Leave the rest of the tax structure alone for now.
Impose a small stock trading tax - Britain's is set at a quarter of one percent and it hasn't hurt their capital markets any.
Set a maximum cap on CEO pay at 30 times the base worker salary - if the company outsources American jobs to be done as slave labor in developing countries for pennies an hour, then the CEO is capped at 30 times that pennies-per-hour rate.
Re-regulate the markets and put an end to infinitely complicated exotic financial instruments where only computer programs can understand the huge and tangled web of dependencies. Allow for real enforcement of the regulations.
These steps (and several others) need to be tied to the bailout with no compromises - make Bush veto it or have the media focus on filibustering Republicans while Wall Street crashes down - they'll come around.