There are lessons in the Brady Plan that can be applied today. One is that, as painful as the bailout is to our sense of free markets, sometimes as Americans we know that pragmatism needs to win out over ideology. Another is that private market solutions to work these problems out can work, but most likely need the imprimatur of a government guarantee behind them for markets to give the workout a chance to work (which is why some form of the Republican alternative is worth exploring). It is too bad that Hank Paulson didnt bother to have read the details of the Brady Plan before he came up with his first proposal. By trying to put together a Bi-partisan political coalition before he had spent a few days researching this relatively recent solution, he put the solution train on the wrong track, by allowing the same people who oversaw the disintegration of Fannie and Freddie to be given far more input at the beginning than they warranted.Now granted, this was at the end of a pretty long article, and there weren't any pictures so you might not have read this far, but it should be pretty clear that the point of the article is that this crisis is NOT as bad as is being hyped by political leaders and the media, and if a government intervention is needed it would be best if it were at least based on a model that has worked before.If the leadership of this country resides in the hands of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama in the future, then we might look back at this time as the period Hank Paulson panicked the country into voting that way.
The kind of debt / income ratio we are sustaining now is similar to that post WWII. But then, we were coming off of a war, and bringing idled or misallocated capital, raw material and labor resources (because they were making things that were meant to be blown up had no long term value to the economy) back to the a productive economy. This time, however, we have run up this debt in a civilian post Cold War context, and don't have new additonal resources that will come on line to pay down the debt.