Conservative Columnist George Will Looks for the Cause of the the Great Recesssion That Occurred Under the Bush Presidency

Surprise, Surprise, It Was Democrats

One of the eternal mysteries of politics and economics is how George Will, the Columnist of the Washington Post and Pundit on ABC News has managed to continue to be published and listened to all these decades. 

His latest work deepens that mystery.

Mr. Will writes of a book,

Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert

 [Disclosure Alert:  The Dismal Political Economist is highly familiar with mortgage financing but has not read this particular book].

And comes to the conclusion that the entire fault of the housing crisis, the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the Bush Presidency which has cost hundreds of billions (and rising) and everything else is the total fault of, who else, liberals and Democrats.

The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.”

Mr. Will concentrates his wrath and review on events that happened in the 1990’s.  Fair enough.  But Mr. Will conveniently ignores what happened in 2001, seven full years before the crisis in housing help bring down the U. S. economy.  That event, of course, was the ascension of Republicans into control of the government.  So in Mr. Will’s world, Democrats in the 1990’s were responsible for an event that took place in 2008, while Republicans who were actually in power and in a position to do something to prevent the crisis in the years 2001-07 have no culpability. 

The villain in Mr. Will’s make believe reality is a person by the name of James A. Johnson, a gentleman who had long left the scene by the time the 2008 crisis hit, but who, conveniently was on the scene when the Democrats were in power a decade or more before the problem. 

In the real world the villain is a Conservative philosophy that says privatization is always good, that regulation is bad, that Washington should not interfere in the private sector, and that the market will regulate itself, a philosophy embodied in the administration of George W. Bush and the Republicans who controlled the government at the time the problem was being created.  However, since Mr. Will’s fealty is more to the philosophy of his politics than the reality of economics and regulation, he will never be able to admit that. 

That he privately holds such a view is his right.  That he is allowed access to the pages of a once great newspaper to distort history to support that view is a tragedy. 

Mr. Will ends his column this way

Morgenson and Rosner report. You decide.

Mr. Will, if you want to be taken objectively do not adopt the mantra of news network that scorns objectivity.  That doesn't help