The House bill, which passed 328-93 and split Republicans almost evenly, would impose a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid after Dec. 31, 2008, by companies that have received more than $5 billion in government bailout money. The tax would not affect workers with adjusted gross incomes below $250,000.

The Senate bill is much broader, affecting bonuses paid after Jan. 1, 2009, by firms receiving more than $100 million in government bailout money. The Senate bill would impose a 35 percent excise tax on the companies that pay the bonuses, and a 35 percent excise tax on the employees who receive them. Those taxes would be in addition to the 25 percent now withheld by the IRS on bonuses up to $1 million, and 35 percent withholding on bonuses above that.

Retention bonuses, like the ones paid to AIG employees, would be fully taxable. The first $50,000 of other bonuses, such as performance bonuses, would be exempt. The Senate bill would also cap deferred compensation for top executives at $1 million a year. Deferred compensation above that amount would come with steep penalties.

More bills are on the way.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., is holding a hearing next week on legislation that would apply to bailout recipients such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and prohibit them from paying "any bonus to any employee, regardless of when any agreement to pay a bonus was entered into."

And Krugman's not happy with Geithner's latest version of the toxic asset plan...

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks' books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn't be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to "fair" levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama's top economic adviser, is to use "the expertise of the market" to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn't really about letting markets work. It's just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there's something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they're doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won't work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus -- for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to -- will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.