2. Place a 90 percent windfall tax on Wall Street profits and bonuses. Profits are returning to the “too big to fail” firms, starting with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. They are making money again because we bailed out the entire financial sector, guaranteed toxic assets, provided liquidity free of charge, changed the accounting standards, and got them repaid from AIG at par value. If people like Andrew J. Hall are permitted to receive $100 million in bonus payments from CitiGroup, a bank we basically own, then 90 percent should be taxed back to us. These firms and their stars owe us, big time. No worker will be able to understand why his or her health care is being taxed while the elites on Wall Street walk off with tens of millions in taxpayer dollars.

3. Install a very small tax on each and every financial transaction on Wall Street. Everyone else in America pays some kind of sales tax on their purchases, why not Wall Street? This kind of fee would generate at least $50 billion a year. This would also have the important benefits of stabilizing the economy in the long term, reducing the risk of future bursting bubbles, by slowing down speculation as well as moving money out of the bloated financial sector and into the real economy. (Of course this would need to be an international tax agreed upon by the G-20 nations to make sure countries don’t game the tax.)