Well, I hear regulations only hold down business anyway, as McCain-Palin tell us. John McCain brags about his experience with deregulation and it sounds like he has his hands all over this bailout as well. Why should anyone sign up to a bailout that doesn’t begin to address this critical issue? Does Paulson think that we’re just supposed to wing it and hope against hope that it’s all going to somehow work out? This is a terribly important issue to ignore considering where we are today. In the John McCain-Keating Five S&L; bailout, we did add regulations, so not now? Let the Republicans properly defend their actions the next time they try to remove regulations and oversight but for now, add them.

The plan, which is still being hammered out with Congress, raises a number of red flags. First and foremost, unlike the process then, there’s no accompanying re-regulation of the financial services industry.

“We educated ourselves enough — we were able to build a competent structure,” says Donald Riegle, who chaired the Senate’s Banking Committee at the time. “We built a legislative package that worked quite well. FIRREA (Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act) included creation of a regulator as well as the RTC.”

Though history shows the S&L; crisis was resolved successfully, there was considerable skepticism about the FIRREA law, the new regulator it created, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the bailout entity, the Resolution Trust Corp., at the time of their creation.

It also wound up costing less than many expected.

In the current rescue plan, the absence of regulatory reform is no small matter, given the size of the problem and the complexity of investment instruments today.