Politics & Power Quote by George W. Bush

There is a particular kind of post-crisis rhetoric that tries to turn an emergency rescue into a shrewd investment, and Bush leans hard into it here. “People forget...” is a preemptive scold: not just a claim of public amnesia, but an attempt to repossess the narrative from critics who branded TARP a giveaway to Wall Street. The ellipsis matters, too. It signals the speaker reaching for patience while still insisting the crowd has missed the point.

The line’s central maneuver is grammatical and moral at once. “We structured it” casts the bailout as design, not panic. It rewrites 2008’s improvisation into technocratic competence. Then comes the slippery pairing, “the government, or the people,” a phrase that collapses a complicated chain of beneficiaries into a simple identity. Taxpayers become co-investors; the state becomes the public; the public becomes a balance sheet.

“Really good rate of return” is the salesman’s alibi, a metric that turns legitimacy into yield. The subtext is defensive: you can dislike the optics, but you can’t argue with the math. Yet the math is also selective. TARP did see repayments and gains in several programs, but focusing on return sidesteps the distributional reality: who was stabilized, who wasn’t, and what pain was socialized while the recovery proved uneven.

“And as it turns out” lands like a verdict, retroactive vindication. It’s less a celebration than a closing argument, offered after the fact to make a morally messy intervention sound clean, rational, and - crucially - repayable.