Northwest already has two promotions that lower elite levels. One for using partners, which nets 5K and another for the credit card which lowers silver by 2K and gives 5K for spending 5 thousand dollars on the WP credit card.
AA remember only drops flyers by one catagorey anyway. So in effect they are only keeping some lowest tier fliers in, and holding everyone else.
If we are in the wishing well, all that I would suggest is making the, currently targetted, wp credit card promotion into a general one, and make it so that it is not an "all or nothing" deal. That is, every user of the wp credit card will get flight miles equal to dollars spent, up to a maximum of 5000.
The advantages of this -
it encourages incremental behavior (spending and flying),
lowers tiers by, effectively, 2 coast to coast flights or one flight to Europe - but it is of no use to people who pulled the plug on flying completely.
allows those just getting into the travel game to be told - look, join us, and you can be an elite flying as few as 15K miles in the next 3 months, a consideration for new people.
For those of us on track to hit qualification at our current levels, it might be an incentive to try for the next tier up, and it will certainly be an incentive to fly NW during the coming tough year for business travel.