In general, the proposed fees and taxes on bonuses are gestures to public opinion that will not impact behavior in the future. Though bankers wail that their compensation is being unfairly repossessed -the stories told in London bars the day the tax was announced were said to be heart wrenching - they know that the taxes are one-off measures designed to appease. Indeed, how could New York and London possibly survive without Wall Street and Canary Wharf?

It is perfectly reasonable for the administration to extract $120 billion from U.S. banks after the investment of trillions of public dollars in the financial sector through both the TARP program and through cheap lending facilities created by the Federal Reserve. But limiting this sum to the amount lost by the federal government's bailout programs - most of it to the still-crippled auto companies and to AIG - illustrates that the fee is about little more than "doing something": on one hand, the administration argues that the $120 billion levy will make up for lost taxpayer dollars; on the other hand, it claims that the fee is justified by the huge profits the financial sector has made from cheap government money.

The real question about financial reform is not itself about compensation. The importance of Goldman Sachs being a hedge fund on top of an investment bank that is now considered a bank holding company is not that the firm - and many of its executives and employees - make so much money, but rather that they make too much money. Indeed, the problem with TARP and subsequent policy measures to address the financial crisis was that they targeted the symptoms of the crisis while ignoring its causes, homeowners defaulting first on exotic and then on much more mainstream mortgages. We're supposed to have learned that the financial sector and the real economy interact in intimate ways. And yet Ben Bernanke can blame the housing crisis on a lack of regulation one one hand and oppose the Consumer Financial Protection Agency on the other.

As E.J. Dionne reminds us in this winter's Dissent, Max Weber considered politics to be "a strong and slow boring of hard boards." Indeed, changes - whether in health care or in the financial sector - cannot be expected to come quickly or easily and cannot be expected to satisfy all or even most of our desires. The flipside, then, is that when politics leads to quick and easy action, the results are often disappointing. So was the case with TARP and so it will be with the administration's proposed fee on banks.