In his speech Wednesday night, Bush said he was addressing the “root causes” of the Wall Street collapse.

But he did no such thing.

Nor is the bailout package getting at them.

The root cause is deregulation.

In 1999, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and Phil Gramm engineered the destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that prohibited regular banks from merging with financial institutions.

Once this firewall was bulldozed, the greedy ones on Wall Street started to spread kindling all around.

Then, in December 2000, Phil Gramm slipped a bill through Congress called the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which prohibited the SEC and other government agencies from outlawing or at least regulating the fancy swaps and derivatives that turned our economy into such a house of cards.

Lenders of mortgages, rather than keeping them in their own institutions, sold them to investors, who repackaged them and resold them. As a result, the risk to the original lender vanished, and mortgage peddlers didn’t care how unqualified their customers were. So a lot of bad paper was floating around.

On top of that, when one institution after another grabbed up “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations,” it was like having vats of raw hamburger meat sitting at room temperature. As soon as some of the meat went bad, it all went bad.

With Wall Street prostrate and coming cup in hand, you’d think that Bush and Congress would exercise some leverage and good sense so this won’t happen again.

But even today, they aren’t proposing the resurrection of Glass-Steagall, or the abolition of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act.

Even today, they aren’t taking the simple and logical step of demanding that the financial institution that gives the mortgage to the customer must hold onto that mortgage—and not be allowed to resell it. That would make the lender more prudent, and what got us into this mess was imprudent, aggressive, and dishonest lending.

What’s more, since the proximate cause of the collapse is the rash of foreclosures, you would think that Bush and Congress would be proposing a moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on mortgage interest rates. But they’re not doing that, either.

No, with Wall Street begging, Bush and Congress are giving them everything—and we’re barely getting anything in return.

Worse, the very set-up that gave rise to this crisis remains untouched, creaky and rotten as it is.

For $700 billion, we should be getting a lot more.