Housing, banking crisis piles pressure on Bush: "LONDON (Reuters) - The housing crisis in the United States is fast spilling into a banking and financial debacle that could destabilize the world economy and put mounting pressure on the Bush administration to act."
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Yes, that's about the size of it. But do we really want the Bush administration to "act"? Act how, precisely? What problem have they acted on with speed and wisdom to date? So far their record is a series of ham-handed, authoritarian, secretive, often-expensive interventions that at best have questionable outcomes. Education reform that nobody likes; taxing and spending so as to produce unprecedented deficits; the botched occupation of Iraq; failing on Social Security reform and then greatly expanding Medicare to include prescription drugs with no idea how to pay for it; faith-based programs that amount to nothing; anti-terror policies that have been repudiated over and over by the courts...you name it. Why would anybody expect the Bush people to have a solution to this spiraling meltdown...a problem that they didn't foresee, did nothing to prevent, and haven't done much about as it progressed to what is now looming disaster? Maybe the best thing to do now is nothing, and give somebody new a chance at the problem in 2009, whoever that may be.