Critic says Bush post-9/11 spending strategy led to Wall Street crisis

 

After terrorists struck on 9/11, killing 3,000 people and shaking Americans to their core, President Bush launched a "war on terror" but told consumers to keep on spending.

"Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said two weeks after the attack. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."

Now, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University is arguing that in encouraging spending instead of sacrifice as the nation went to war first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, Bush fueled a binge of credit card spending. Andrew Bacevich wrote in Sunday's Washington Post:

Bush seems to have calculated -- cynically but correctly -- that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance. Members of Congress calculated -- again correctly --that their constituents were looking to Capitol Hill for largess, not lessons in austerity. In this sense, recklessness on Main Street, on Wall Street and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue proved mutually reinforcing.

Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, further argues that the "go to Disney World" strategy also eventually forced Bush to scale back his own ambitions to transform the Middle East. Public appetite for war ebbed with increasing casualties and costs. Now, says the professor, the bill is due.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Eric Draper's White House photo of President Bush addressing 9/11 rescue workers via bullhorn at ground zero on Sept. 14, 2001.

Comments

[carol raulston]

How ludicrous to compare "Disney World" type spending to the horrendous debt run up by the mismanagement and greed of politicians who wanted to "help the poor" by pushing unsound loans (personally benefitting, of course) in the Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae scandal. Bush and Mccain (check the record) tried in 2001, 2003, 2005 to get some regulation & oversight to these two govt. boondoggles but Barney Frank, Charles Shumer, Chris Dodd poo-poohed the idea that these were anything less than very sound.
Of course the simplistic "It's all Bush's fault" plays well with so many non-thinking people!!