Take a look Veronique de Rugy and Philippe Lacoude's alternative bailout plan. They analyze the history of the Great Depression and some ways the gov't could still be highly interventionist without completely dooming our economy (as the current plan does. And before you get all crazy and say that the bills already been signed into law, remember the current administration does not regard the executive branch as having to abide by any laws. A small sampling of there plan:
That being said, if the president and Congress were dead set on addressing the lack of cash in the economy, they still could have done so in a way that would have achieved the goal of injecting liquidity into the banking system while exposing taxpayers to far less uncertainty.
How? By taking the $700 billion they plan to give to Wall Street and sending checks worth $3,600 to the 191 million U.S. taxpayers. Such checks would then have to be deposited into some type of retirement account or be subject to the IRS's premature IRA distribution rules.
The most risk-averse people would invest this windfall into relatively safe money market funds, thereby preventing the credit crunch predicted by the pundits. Some would buy instruments such as mutual funds, which would sustain the market. Savvier investors, or at least those with a high risk threshold, would profit from the low prices on Wall Street to purchase stock in distressed banks.
Less than 30 days from the presidential election, such a measure would have proven popular with an electorate that does not trust the very politicians and technocrats who ignored the warning signs of a crisis and contradicted themselves constantly. And it would have prevented the socializing of a big chunk of Wall Street, a risky and unprecendented intervention into markets whose full effects won't be clear for many years to come.
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