The current economic crisis just seems to be getting worse. Rampant inflation, bad gas prices, a failing stock market. It’s enough to make someone almost want to move out of the country.

So who should we blame? It would be easy to blame the Republicans. They have pursued a course of aggressive deregulation which certainly has contributed to the current crisis, but can we really blame them for doing that? They came into power in the middle of an economic high point. So the natural impulse for conservatives was to deregulate. It’s Reaganomics at its finest. Allow corporations the freedom to make as much money as they can in a growing economy and that money will trickle down to everyone else.

But deregulation has some problems. First, it only works when an economy is doing well. In a bad economy, the money doesn’t trickle down as fast, so working and middle class people can’t keep up with the inflation that goes along with it. It also encourages bad business practices by letting CEOs and companies take advantage of the market to make as much money as they can without regard to consequences. There’s enough blame to go around.

Even though they voted down the first bailout package, it seems like Congress is agreed that it’s time to do something. I’m no economist, but as a taxpayer here’s what I would like to see:

We don’t need to just throw money at the problem - it could end up doing more harm than good. We need to let some of these companies die. We need to let the market take care of some of these Fortune 500 companies that got us here in the first place. They’ll go under and get bought out by companies that are doing well. That’s what is supposed to happen in a free market. The companies we should bail out are the ones who have been effected by this crisis but are not responsible for it. We need to make sure that companies with good and honest business practices have a leg-up if they need it. We also need to make sure there are programs to help small businesses.

No golden parachutes. You’ll hear a lot of politicians talk about not bailing out corrupt CEOs and on this one I’m with them 100 percent. I’ll even go one better and say there shouldn’t be any money for CEOs at all in the bailout package. If we help a company we should help the company and not its manager. If a CEO has lost so much money that he’ll need help buying food, there are already programs for that. But I seriously doubt any of these CEOs are going to sink that far.

Make sure the taxpayers are protected. We’re giving money from the taxes we pay to help out this economy, so we should have some guarantee of what this money is for and where it’s going. Our elected officials have to stay focused on this one and not allow the usual political process to dilute this effort. They have to make sure this money is going to fix the economy and not be funneled into other areas or just given with a free hand.

There needs to be genuine regulatory oversight of this effort. It needs to come from both the legislative and judicial branches. If there are two governmental branches looking over their shoulder, the Feds will have to do the right thing. We can’t just hand them a blank check. We have to set benchmarks for economic performance so we can say, “By X date we should see Y improvement.” These don’t need to be rigid benchmarks since predicting how the economy goes is never exact. We just need to have measures in place to figure out if the bailout is working and how well it is working. If these benchmarks are not met, Congress needs to have the power to go back in and change the package. We may find out in the future that we need to add more money or that we put in more than we needed.

I think we’ll see a deal made on a bailout very soon, but what form it will take is not at all clear. I’ve seen most of these ideas proposed at some level over the past few days, but never all in the same package and I hope some or all of them make it into the final bailout. We just need to make sure that from now on, we have sensible regulations that allow businesses to grow, but keep them in check enough to avoid any more market crashes.

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