Or we could do it right ...

By the time you read these words it's likely that Congress will have passed an economic "recovery" package that will prove to be a big mistake. It will pass not because a majority buys its merits, but because the Dow Jones Average dropped 777 points Monday when they rejected an earlier draft. That's what lets President Bush warn us that the crisis is deepening with every passing day; the screaming emergency is psychological, not economic.

Congress is on the verge of becoming a glorified bomb squad, with the single goal of defusing the ticking bomb as fast as they can, driven by fear they'll take the rap for causing the collapse of the American economy. The bomb's explosive ingredient is a collective desperation (at least among the investor class) for someone, somehow, to fix this scary mess, no matter what the details.

I don't know whether or not this deserves its current billing as a once-in-a-lifetime crisis — I doubt it, especially if we spend this trillion bucks merely to ease the short-term pain. But it definitely looks like a once-in-a-lifetime fork in the road.

The system is broken because some of its core elements just can't work over time, and I believe almost all of us know it. When economic prosperity depends on levels of consumption so dramatically higher than what we need to thrive, your system is going to crash. When much of the nation's greatest personal wealth is accumulated through the creation and marketing of arcane paper instruments that add no value to the community (leaving no value to lean on when there's a crunch), you're going to crash. When most Americans rack up mountains of debt and are constantly teased to take on more ("No payments and 0 percent interest until 2012!"), when a manufacturing sector is exported wholesale and replaced with temporary jobs paying half as much, when we buy billions more from other countries every month than they buy from us, when you build a house of cards and then add on a second third and fourth story — it's going to crash.

Economists have been telling us this for years, and most of the rest of us have been whistling past the graveyard. Precious little has been done about it because those who've profited most from this joyride maintained massive political power. Now they're standing at the public trough — our trough — as they never have before. Does that mean they've lost their power? That's exactly what's being decided this week. We're told, both by presidential candidates and most of Congress' Democrats, that as aggravating as bailing out Wall Street profiteers might be, the alternative is much worse; if these Bad Boys go down, they're taking the rest of us with them.

Is that true? We're not going to find out from a couple dozen hours of panicky Congressional meetings on Capitol Hill, mostly behind closed doors. Could there ever be a better time than this for a national conversation on how to remodel our financial house? The Internet and some print media are ablaze right now with creative proposals, some of which take the ball out of Wall Street's hands. Some of these new ideas are probably complete economic gibberish, but I've seen some that look a lot smarter than a trillion-dollar blood transfusion into a terminal patient. If we only had time to sift through them ...

But there is no time! "Our economic crisis is deepening with every passing day."

Okay, let's make a concession to reality. Congress could authorize Hank Paulson to spend a measly $100 billion over the next two months, guided by a list of principles that they already claim to support: protection of taxpayers' equity, no goodies of any kind for the Bad Boys, stemming the hemorrhage of families losing their homes, a fast healthy flow of cash for small businesses. After one month a Blue Ribbon panel of diverse economists and accountants would start judging whether the money's supporting those aims. If so, Paulson gets another $100 billion for another monitored two months.

After signing the bill, President Bush stands up between Senators McCain and Obama for a joint statement: "This is a down payment on setting our financial house in order — and there's more where it came from. Since we've already admitted to you we don't know how this will play out, we won't recklessly bet our whole stake at once. We now have time to transparently examine proposals that might repair rather than bandage this mess. We're committed to doing this — not as fast, but as well as we can — without stoking your fears for the future. We're betting you're grownup enough to handle a short period of uncertainty for the sake of our children, our communities and our country." (They could add "the greatest country in the world" here, if they want). "Please prove us right."

Would we?

Jeff Golden is the author of "As If We Were Grownups," "Forest Blood" and the new novel "Unafraid" (with excerpts at www.unafraidthebook.com).