[Mb-civic] 'Whatever It Costs' - Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

'Whatever It Costs'

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 19, 2005; Page A17

It's hard to say what's worse: The incompetence of the administration's 
initial hurricane response or the cowardice of its follow-up. Faced with 
a small hit to his ratings, the president who once boasted of ignoring 
polls is rushing to spend billions of other people's dollars on saving 
his political skin. His philosophy is, "It's going to cost whatever it 
costs." That phrase should be the title of some future history of the 
Bush era.

The worst part is, President Bush doesn't even think his splurge will be 
effective. If he really believed that government could overcome racial 
inequality by targeting subsidies at minority businesses, he should have 
rolled out a national program long ago. But he doesn't believe anything 
of the kind. His promises of racial healing are entirely cynical.

What Bush really believes is that government is ineffective. Or at least 
that's what he says he believes: Late last week he declared that his 
(self-) reconstruction program should be financed by cuts in other 
government spending rather than by tax increases, so as to "maintain 
economic growth and vitality." In other words, government spending is 
bad because it's inefficient and wasteful. Leaving money in private 
hands is intrinsically superior. If Bush believes that, why does he 
think that government should build whole shantytowns of provisional 
housing? Why doesn't he believe in the private rental market of the 
South, which is offering 1.1 million units of vacant property?

Early on after the catastrophe, Small Government Bush suspended a law 
that props up construction wages paid by federal contractors, with the 
result that workers in the disaster zone will have less disposable 
income but government will save money.

One week later, after the panic had set in, Reconstruction Bush was 
yammering about $5,000 worker recovery accounts, which would come on top 
of the free government homes and sundry other benefits that the 
administration is also promising.

If Bush used this moment as he used the aftermath of Sept. 11, some of 
this spending could be forgiven. The attacks on the World Trade Center 
and the Pentagon exposed the nation's complacency about terrorism; Bush 
stepped forward and changed that. In a similar way, Hurricane Katrina 
exposed the complacency of our business-as-usual attitude toward 
domestic government. Bush has barely noticed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801394.html
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