By his calculation, the best performers during the recent economic downturn are Berkshire Hathaway and HSBC. Thus, presumably, they should be paying the biggest bonuses to their managers.

Given the total inactivity and disgraceful buck-passing of our government leaders on this issue, I think that any new idea is a good one. Surely deferring vesting of stock options would be a welcome change. But personally I think that the whole problem of bonuses and stock options can be addressed with simplicity and without mathematical formulae.

First, one must throw the public into the equation—and, this time, not as a victim. What this means is that bonuses need to be capped, perhaps by taxation. The public simply won’t put up with seeing bankers rake in eight-figure sums while people, less-favored corporations, and local governments are being forced to cut back. That’s what taxes are for. Tax ’em.

As for the uneven paradigm that I mentioned at the outset—poor performance not necessarily reflected in compensation—I have a modest proposal. What’s needed is what I call a “negative bonus.” We all know how well bankers and traders do when their strategies perform well. But if their strategies don’t perform well—if the successors to subprime mortgages, for instance, go belly-up—bankers need to endure some of the pain that they are inflicting on the rest of us. They should pay, and pay us, not their bosses. After all, we bailed them out during the last financial crisis. It’s only fair.

Now, I know some will protest that what I’ve proposed here is communistic or vindictive or other stuff like that, and that limits on compensation will drive our best brains offshore. Good riddance, I say. Wall Street likes to proclaim that it celebrates the individual, and even the biggest banks like to say that they encourage their people to “think like owners.”

Guess what, guys? Owners of real businesses suffer real pain when they make big mistakes. Their businesses fail. The difference is that their failure doesn’t require a multitrillion-dollar government bailout. Our elected officials have a responsibility to keep that from happening again.

By curbing the bankers’ more screwball ideas, the threat of a negative bonus would make the financial system safer for the rest of us. It would also have the unintended side effect of saving the bankers from their own avarice.