Here's a thought: If we are going to spend $2 trillion (and most likely more) trying to deal with the economic crisis, shouldn't we do it right?

The price of getting it wrong is, after all, extremely high. Think of a patient suffering from a grave viral infection who is treated with antibiotics. Not only will the treatment be unsuccessful, it will delay the proper care dangerously long.

So the ways the Obama administration handles the next phase of the bank bailout and the debate over the stimulus package are crucial.

So far, the debate over the stimulus package is, for starters, getting tied up in -- and dragged down by -- the public's widespread disgust at almost every aspect of the bank bailout, from the lack of transparency to the ongoing cluelessness of the Wall Street Marie Antoinettes to the lack of any recovery bang for our billions of bailout bucks.

Even worse than all that is wrong with the original bailout is the prospect, when Timothy Geithner announces his plans for the remaining $350 billion, of the new administration's repeating the mistakes of the old.

Early indications are that the next bailout tranche will be handed out from an equally Wall Street-centric perspective -- animated by the belief that all that ails us can be cured by pumping a few trillion into our financial institutions. This despite the mounting evidence that the best interests of the banks and the best interests of America are no longer aligned.

As Niall Ferguson told me in Davos, "It is time to start new banks; the old banks need to be completely restructured." And this includes an end to paying dividends to shareholders -- not to mention an end to bonuses, redecorating, new jets, Super Bowl parties and stadium-naming deals.

President Obama needs to make it clear that the next phase of the bailout is going to be handled radically differently than the first go-round. As Bloomberg has reported, Henry Paulson invested twice as much taxpayer money in Goldman Sachs as Warren Buffett, yet gained warrants that were worth one-fourth as much. And the Goldman terms were repeated in most of the other bank bailouts. "If Paulson were still an employee of Goldman Sachs and he'd done this deal," said Joseph Stiglitz, "he would have been fired."

This is a mad-as-hell moment (see Sen. Claire McCaskill), and Obama needs to make it clear to the bankers that the American people are not going to take it anymore. And this requires more than finger-wagging -- it requires disgorging.

The administration also needs to use the debate over the stimulus package to rethink its too-timid approach; otherwise, we are going to miss a huge opportunity to both arrest our economic freefall and create a 21st century economy.

"I support the stimulus package," Van Jones, author of "The Green Economy," told me. "But when I look at it in its entirety, I fear that we may soon look back and say that we missed a huge chance to go bigger and bolder. After all, there were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed: It favored consumption over production; debt over smart savings; and environmental damage over environmental renewal. Some parts of the stimulus package seem to be more of the same -- trying to prop up the old, failed economy. That strategy simply won't work -- but we could waste a lot of money and time trying. Instead, we need a new direction for our economy. You can't jump halfway across a chasm -- you just end up falling into the abyss."

Rick Levin, president of Yale and an economics professor, echoed Van Jones' call for "bigger and bolder": "First of all, there's a question of magnitude. The overall stimulus is about 6 percent of GDP. We did not exit the Great Depression without a stimulus that amounted to about 25 percent of GDP -- we called that World War II. . . . The second problem is with the mix. . . . Only $335 billion worth goes to job creation -- that's about 3.5 million jobs, about $100,000 a job. Three-and-a-half million jobs is only two percentage points on the unemployment rate. That's not enough. I would get rid of the tax cuts and use the entire package for job creation. . . . There are lots of great public-works projects that would be well worth supporting. And, in the near term, what about CCC-type activities that put people to work right away, cleaning up public parks, weather-stripping homes, offices, schools, government buildings?"

Many experts in the key areas the stimulus package involves -- including healthcare and education -- are equally critical but reluctant to go on the record since, after all, there is something rather than nothing for them in the current bill. One high-ranking expert on education told me off the record: "We are really wasting an enormous opportunity. They are going to spend something like $100 billion on education and not get much reform. At this point, they would have so much leverage to get the unions to really think differently. Unions are worried about teacher layoffs. So Obama could say we'll give you money in exchange for tenure reform and teacher accountability. The president has a lot more leverage than he's using to rebuild a system that's not working."

As Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, told me: "I'm often asked, given Hollywood's struggles, if I were building a movie studio system from scratch, is the current model what I would build?"

The answer was, of course, no. Likewise, given the chance to rebuild America's economy, is the current system, with a few hundred billion dollars worth of patches, the one we want to build?

Obama has added or talked about adding several new cabinet-level positions, such as chief technology officer, climate czar and car czar. How about an advisory cabinet of economic thinkers who can offer the president big ideas for a 21st century economy?

A good place to start would be among those who sounded the alarm about our current financial crisis -- all of whom are critical of the short-sighted, ad-hoc nature of the stimulus bill. People like Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who was so prescient about the collapse. Lawmakers, he says, are "injecting populist politics into economics decisions. Companies and sectors that should be left to drown are being floated lifeboats."

Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who was instrumental in transitioning the economic system of the former Soviet Union, is also no fan of the stimulus bill, calling it a "a fiscal pinata," an "astounding mish-mash of tax cuts, public investments, transfer payments and special treats for insiders," and "a grab bag of hasty short-run spending." He warns that "without a sound medium-term fiscal framework, the stimulus package can easily do more harm than good." This is especially true, he says, "if we allow further tax cuts during a time of fiscal hemorrhage, or give into 'bipartisan' demands to make the Bush tax cuts permanent."

Joseph Stiglitz is equally leery of the tax cuts that have been included in the stimulus package. "We are in uncharted territory in this crisis," he says. "But household tax cuts, except for possibly the poorest, should have no place in the stimulus. Nor should business tax breaks, except when closely linked with additional investment. . . . Increased investments in infrastructure, education and technology, relief to states, and help to the unemployed need pride of place."

In October, Alan Greenspan, one of the poster children of the old system, conceded that there was a "flaw in the model." I'd say that events since then have exuberantly proven that to be an understatement. There's not a flaw in the model -- the model itself is flawed.

And instead of bailing water out of the sinking ship, we should construct a replacement appropriate for navigating the economic seas of the 21st century -- and steer it in the right direction.

Recent Political Commentary

Obama Economic Team's Flawed Cosmology:
Still Believing Universe Revolves around Banks
Arianna Huffington

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

First, these are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

Second, they are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

My Wish List
Andy Rooney

In an idle moment, trying to come up with an idea, Humorist & Commentator Andy Rooney decided to make a list of things he should do but has not.

I Would Rather Stay Home & Not Travel
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney would like to mount a campaign once again to encourage people not to go anywhere as he was looking at all the ads in newspapers and magazines for places to go. Sometimes, travel is quite unpleasant.

I'm Hedging Today
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney sees the phrase "hedge fund" in the newspaper every day now and does not really know what a "hedge fund" is. A hedge fund has something to do with money. He was surprised to find "hedge fund" in one of only six dictionaries, but then read the definition.

Greening My House
Arianna Huffington

Ever since I saw the Green light, thanks to my friend Laurie David, and traded in my gas-guzzling SUV, I've tried my best to up my eco-awareness.

On the Road to Buenos Aires
Even the United States can Manage Itself into Irrelevance
Chris Thomas

America has been the greatest of all nations for a long time. We have been great for so long that we believe it is part of the natural order of the universe for us to be who we are. But in reality, we managed our way to where we are now. We decided to create the Constitution. We decided to have an open culture. We decided to have free trade and open markets. The sum total of these decisions created this great human enterprise.

But we should not forget, especially at a crucial juncture like this, that with enough bad decisions and enough political incompetence, we can indeed manage ourselves into decline.

Even we can become Argentina.

Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas
by Arianna Huffington

According to most commentators, the president's press conference went a long way toward taking the spotlight off the roiling anger over AIG, bonuses and Wall Street abuses -- and putting it back where the president wants it: on the imperative need to pass his budget.

But the best laid plans of our remarkable president may be laid to waste by a bank rescue plan that is the product of exhausted ideas put together by men far too beholden to Wall Street.

To understand why a man as brilliant and accomplished as Summers can be so wrong about what to do with the banks and Wall Street, it would be useful to turn to "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

What if Jon Stewart, Instead of John King,
Interviewed Dick Cheney
Arianna Huffington

Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment -- not just for Stewart, Cramer and CNBC, but also for journalism. Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney three days later.

King opened the interview by showing clips of President Obama saying that his administration had "inherited an economic crisis" and "inherited a big mess." He then asked Cheney: "Did you leave him a mess?"

"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances," responded Cheney. "It's a global financial problem. . . . So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration, that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that."

Tim Geithner, CNBC &
The Second Coming of Known Unknowns
Arianna Huffington on Tim Geithner, Economic Crisis & Obama Budget

Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, we seem to be drowning in unknowns.

Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we're being told. Instead, we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns.

The Rush and Rahm Show
Chris Thomas

This past week, while iconic American enterprises like GE and Berkshire came under substantial market pressure, our "Leadership" in Washington became preoccupied with talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Rahm Emmanuel (left), a brilliant partisan tactician, and Clinton retreads Paul Begala and James Carville formulated a plan to make Limbaugh the face of the GOP.

After all, its much more fun than wondering why the Credit Default Swap market is treating GE like Citibank or weather we can spend ourselves out of a recession that we got into by ... well ... spending too much. Rush is much more fun to listen to than Jeff Immelt anyway.

Rove Pontificating on Economy Like Madoff Pontificating on Investing

Although anointed as "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party," Rush Limbaugh is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove.

The Credit Card Crisis: The Next Economic Domino

Hot on the heels of the banking crisis, the employment crisis and the mortgage-foreclosure crisis, the country is on the verge of experiencing a credit-card crisis.

Time to Treat American Homeowners as Well as Wall Street Bankers
Arianna Huffington

"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail? So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed thinking.

America's Best Bet: Municipal Redemption Fund (MuRF)
Stopping Foreclosures & Protecting Investors

An original economic stimulus plan developed by a real estate agent in New Jersey that is currently in the hands of the House of Representatives and every Senator in Washington D.C. The Federal Government purchases NO interest in any private property and may take NO assignment of any lien under this plan. This plan is strictly a transparent "time-out" and "reset" of the national tax lien industry for the sake of stopping foreclosures while simultaneously protecting investors by shoring up the absolute bedrock of the capitalist economy which emanates directly from real property values and the taxes thereon.

John Thain, Poster Child for Era of Irresponsibility
Arianna Huffington

There is plenty of debate about what President Obama's stimulus bill should look like -- as well there should be, given all that is at stake. But there is a growing consensus that the guiding principle in that debate should be Obama's call for a "new era of responsibility."

Helping fuel that consensus is the saga of the rise and fall of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, the poster child for the Era of Irresponsibility. The condemnation of his behavior is completely bipartisan.

Barack Obama Sober Sermon on the Steps
Arianna Huffington

The new president and the throng that turned out to cheer him and hear him on Inauguration Day were on two very different missions.

The crowd had come to celebrate. Obama had come to deliver a sober sermon.

Inaugural Address By President Barack Hussein Obama
President Obama's Inauguration Speech in text & video

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address after taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. The presidential inauguration is a tradition dating back to George Washington's 1789 inauguration. President Obama's Inauguration Speech in full in text & video.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism
Arianna Huffington

The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking.

Does the Madoff Debacle Finally End the 'Who Could have Known' Era?
Arianna Huffington

An ambitious and risky undertaking carried out with hubris, and featuring the weeding out of anyone who raises alarms, little-to-no transparency, an oversight system in which no central authority is accountable, and the deliberate manufacturing of ambiguity and complexity so that when it all falls to pieces, the excuse who could have known can be used

Rewarding Those Who Got It Right
Arianna Huffington

Among its myriad failings, the Bush administration has repeatedly gotten it wrong when it comes to getting it right.

Over the last eight years, there has consistently been no penalty for those who have gotten things -- even the most important things -- wrong, and no reward for those who have gotten things right.

Call it Bush Darwinism: Survival of the Unfittest.

The Economic Meltdown Will Be Blogged
Politics Arianna Huffington

Losing your job -- or even fearing that you might -- can make you feel powerless. But at the same time you are looking for work -- or learning a new skill -- you can take up blogging. It doesn't require anyone's permission, there is no application process. You just need blogging software (some of the best is free) and the will to express yourself.

(Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)

(c) 2009 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.