More thoughts on the bailout

An interesting economic recovery/bailout plan from the Institute for Policy Studies, which came to my attention via Progressive Democrats of America.

The IPS plan calls for a broad economic stimulus for the real economy as well as a rescue of Wall Street. The proposal contains some interesting and quite attractive specifics on how to pay for the plan--IPS argues that Wall Street, being the main culprits of the crisis and main beneficiaries of any bailout, ought to have to foot its bill themselves--and how to regulate/re-regulate the financial industry in order to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

The plan is weak on specifics regarding the taxpayer equity issue, which most economists seem to regard as an essential sticking point. Personally, I think if we're going to be offering any sort of taxpayer money for these firms, we really ought to nationalize them and take full control of their operations. In that sense, we should be following Iceland's lead. For an interesting and, readers beware, explicitly leftist proposal on what we could do with these financial firms if in fact we nationalized them, as well as other steps to take moving forward, check out this interesting piece by David Schweickart, which appeared in yesterday's ZNet.