Paulson is going to have to do much better if he wants to bail out his old friends on Wall Street. The Bear Stearns CEO walked away with $61 million (some failure there, huh?), Merrill Lynch’s top three are looking at a cool $200 million for the fire sale to Bank of America and now Lehman, the company that supposedly was on the rocks, now has a $2.5 BILLION bonus plan. Looking at these numbers, most Americans would be living a dream so they would never imagine that’s what some of the biggest failures are receiving for crashing the US economy. If Paulson wants fast action, maybe he ought to start re-thinking about his plan because I’m not hearing much pain out of Wall Street yet. Millions and billions in bonuses tells me that they’re still having fun and living well though maybe for an ex-Goldman guy like Paulson it’s all chump change and he thinks we’re all chumps.

Democrats said they understood the need for urgency but insisted that the measure needed to provide help for homeowners threatened with losing their homes, perhaps by changes in bankruptcy laws to allow for mortgages to be modified, and by capping pay and benefit packages for executives at the huge Wall Street firms that will be selling their bad debt to the government. “I don’t want the American taxpayer to get this bad debt and then the guy (whose company once held the bad loans) gets millions of dollars on his way out the door,” said House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.