I think that the current economic crisis is a wonderful opportunity to take care of our long-term infrastructure problems, and to make long-overdue adjustments in policy to help protect the environment and all members of American society. The purpose of this isn't to talk about any details, but rather to establish a general principle that is required in order to make the process effective.
General principle:
No one -- and I mean absolutely no one -- should be allowed to get rich from public funds.
In fact, I think that this principle should always be obeyed, even when we aren't in a depression. It should be a law, hell, a constitutional amendment. And certainly it should be true in these hard times.
It seems clear that the best chance to revive the economy is for the government to put a lot of money into circulation, and there are lots of really good things that have been waiting for this opportunity: better mass transit is potentially huge, nation-wide residential fiber-optics, single-payer healthcare, government-funded higher education, and so on. These initiatives and other similar ones would put a lot of people back to work and put a lot of food on a lot of tables.
Notice, though, that in every single case, the traditional way to achieve these goals would result in a relatively small number of people (corporate executives, investors, middle-men) making out like bandits, and that's going to piss people off. Yes, it's great to get hundreds of thousands of people working again, but I submit that there will be no long term solution to our ills if at the same time, our public funds create a bunch of millionaires and further enrich people who are already very rich.
The focus of bailout spending should be on three things: public infrastructure, public institutions (including corporations but not individual executives or investors), and finding training, jobs, or other support for people who do not have enough money to live in moderate comfort.
This is not to say that people shouldn't be free to try to get rich, far from it, but simply that they shouldn't be allowed to do it with public money.
To enforce this principle, I think that there should be an independent anti-profiteering Inspector General corps whose role is to search through the jungle of federal funding, looking for situations where individuals are getting more than their share from the public trough. The method of control would simply be a very high tax (i.e, 100% above a certain threshold), unless fraud or other illegal behavior was involved.
As I said, I think this should be a permanent part of our system, but it would be acceptable to me if the law or regulation implementing it had a sunset provision with optional renewal, and was aimed solely (or initially) at our current crisis.
Greg Shenaut