This morning, Matthew Yglesias noted the House Republicans' torpedoing the deal with their magic tax cuts BS and made the following suggestion, which is what I've been thinking as well:
If conservatives won’t play ball, I think the smart move for progressives on the Hill is to come back to Bush and Paulson with a much less palatable plan — huge stimulus, big tax hikes on super-high earners, mortgage cramdowns, etc. Let Bush either cave 100 percent to a Nancy Pelosi dream deal or else let Bush bring McCain and John Boehner to the table. There’s no reason for progressives to be making concessions to the Bush administration and the financial industry if they can’t even get their lackeys to back their own plan.
Hell, I say go the whole 9 yards and adopt the Bernie Sanders plan.
If the Democrats are going to stick their necks out they need to make this THEIR plan. Something they can go back to their constituents with and say they stuck it too the fat cats instead of knuckling under to them. The Bush Administration is in NO position to negotiate, having waited until this was a crisis to act when plenty of enomists saw this coming 18 months ago -- and Barack spoke about the dangers almost a year ago himself!
I also have a modest proposal on Executive pay at any firm that gets bailout money: instead of a set dollar figure, make it a multiple of what they give the lowest-paid worker in their company -- e.g., no more than 50X the lowest salary and watch as the bottom salaries rise through the roof. Heck, I think this should be applied nationwide: we'd have assembly line workers making $100 per hour!