I seriously think we lucked up yesterday. For whatever reason…Pelosi’s strategy (or screwup), Republican ideological differences, or just plain lack of leadership, the bailout plan failed in the House yesterday, and there’s no real chance of another vote until Thursday (mainly due to Rosh Hashanah). Awesome.

Realistically, something is going to happen…there’s too much pressure at this point on the government to do SOMETHING. But ironically, the combination of the vote failure and the postponement gives us the 72 hours to read and discuss the bill that the Sunlight Foundation had started a petition for. It’s probably inevitable that the existing bill will be the starting point; there isn’t enough time to create yet another plan out of whole cloth. But with 3 days between votes, Congressmen will have time to talk to more economists about options, citizens can continue to educate themselves and talk to their reps, and the media can hopefully contribute constructively to the discussion.

Already, we’re getting some ideas that seem plausible to me, like the proposal to increase FDIC insurance from $100K to $250K. We need more solutions that will calm and loosen the credit markets and start to deal with the ongoing housing crisis, not just reward risk-taking Wall St. executives because they’re too big to fail.