Is the way that hurts the economy the least. That might be taxes. It might be debt. Or it might be some mixture.

It would be a huge coincidence if approaching the question as purely a matter of "fair play" produced that result. I.e., "make the bad guys pay" or "tax the rich" or "tax the investor class" are poor choices.

My rather weakly-held conjecture is that debt is better than taxes, because we're "investing" rather than "spending" the money. I.e., we're getting assets in return for our money, and financing an asset purchase with debt makes sense in the same way that buying a car with a loan makes sense.

If the market is truly in a panic, the result is to undervalue assets. If the bailout sets prices at a level above the panic level, but below the long-term reasonable value, we might end up with a profit at the end of they day. That's what happened when we bailed out the S&L's twenty years ago. It could happen!

The underlying question is whether we're "saving the financial system" or "bailing out the scumbags". My read is that the financial system almost disintegrated last week (key clue was when the money market froze solid.) We have to get past the panic, and how we do it is very much a second-order question.