printGeorge W. Bush did his share to bring about the housing bubble, and Stephen Moore, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, knows it. Moore wrote a book he’d like us to forget: “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer” (2004). “Bullish” got one and a half stars on Amazon and it had almost no takers. Moore and Larry Kudlow have no business obfuscating about Number 43’s enthusiasm for giving credit to those who were not creditworthy.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals. “No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”
The two’s article, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?”, offers only a veiled allusion to the shared Clinton-Bush blame for the housing bubble:
There was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story. And the Fannie/Freddie chapter is still not solved. It now includes profit-sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.
But not a word about Bush II. And no mea culpa from Moore for his zeal for Bush’s phony “ownership society.”
UPDATE (6/9/016):
The most unqualified man to hold the highest office in the land (#Obama) calls #Hillary most qualified person to hold the same office.
— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) June 9, 2016