Bonus and bailouts

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver posted about the prospects for the passage of the bonus tax. By his logic, the bill has a very small chance of passing in its present form. In light of this, the question Ed Henry posed last night is not totally without merit:

Maybe a better question would have been "what are you going to do about the AIG bonus?" versus, "why did it take you so long to speak up?". I think that Obama's answer to the question posed couldn't be beaten. And as far as the "what are you going to do about it?" approach...well, it probably isn't going to be a tax.

Better minds than mine noted that the bill passed would create a law that...

would apply only to payments made from January 1, 2009 forward. But almost prospective is like half pregnant. The bill is retrospective for just long enough to clawback the politically fetishized AIG bonuses, while leaving those who made out during the thick of the toxic credit bubble completely untouched. It has all of the philosophical distastefulness of an ex post law, and no offsetting benefit whatsoever, other than punishing a few trophy miscreants from AIG. [em]

So, what do we take away from the sound and fury of this all? Krugman has already noted and others chimed in, "we are not going to stop, or change, the bailout plan. And there won't be another congressionally approved bailout, either. Those wads have been shot."

I hope that this consensus is wrong.