Before we sign off on the Bush administration’s $700 billion banker bailout – which will end up costing only $700 billion the way the Iraq war ended up costing only $50 billion – there’s one word we might think about.

“Punitive.”

As in Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson’s warning about putting limits on salaries or bonuses at the companies now lining up for billions in government consolation, “If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work.”

So basically, we have to be careful about making it too hard for them to take our money, and doing anything that might interfere with the eight-figure salaries Wall Street considers a given. At this rate, the $700 billion won’t be a hedge fund. More like a hedge hog fund.

The original plan flung at Congress by Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a three-page free hand in spending an unimaginable sum in government money, with no accountability now or ever, has caused the entire political spectrum to gag. Astoundingly, it seems as though even Congress, which has for eight years thought its constitutional role was not to make any trouble, is resisting.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., pronounced this week, “What they have sent us is not acceptable.” Ranking GOP member Richard Shelby of Alabama said, “We have got to look at some alternatives.”

Next thing, Congress might actually contemplate doing some advising and consenting.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., is in a mood to do lots of advising and very little consenting. To Paulson’s concern about the “punitive” aspect of limiting executive pay, he asks, “What else do you expect from a guy who gave himself a $39 million bonus his last year on Wall Street?”

DeFazio, like a number of people in Congress, also takes exception to Paulson’s warnings against giving the federal government the chance to take a share of companies in exchange for all its money, a policy which the secretary warns again might discourage companies from participating.

“It’s not socialism to give them money and take their bad debts; it’s just socialism if the government shares in the profits?” DeFazio asks.

The congressman asks a couple of even more fundamental questions about the proposal, such as connecting it to regulation to make sure this doesn’t happen again – the kind of regulation we’ve been previously assured was unnecessary, not to say dangerous.

The moment is, DeFazio points out, “an ephemeral opportunity” – let it go, and in three months one of the math Ph.D.s now working for hedge funds will devise an even more clever and complicated financial offering, and away we’ll go again.

He also asks the question that nobody else wants to: Where does the government get the $700 billion?

“They are unable to tell us,” says DeFazio. “Bush either prints the money, or borrows it, and they can’t tell us who’ll lend it.”

His idea is a one-quarter of 1 percent tax on stock transactions, which he says would bring in $100 billion a year, barely touch 401(k)s, and land mostly on major traders. To the claim that this would drive financial business to London, he points out that London already has the same tax.

Nobody knows how much impact Democrats will ultimately have on the bailout, which most people still expect to happen quickly. But Democrats have a vast amount of – you should pardon the financial term – leverage, since it’s clear that congressional Republicans don’t want to get anywhere near the Bush/Paulson proposal.

So it may turn out that after Paulson has asked Congress for unlimited ability to scatter $700 billion – or maybe $1 trillion, we’re all friends here – upon banks and investment companies holding billions in imaginative but unsaleable securities, Congress may be less sympathetic to his wish not to be in any way “punitive.”

Although you can understand Paulson’s concern.

After all, what kind of a system do you think we’re running here? Capitalism?