Word: budget
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Congress could muster the moxie to close 86 outmoded military bases was first to appoint a commission whose recommendations will automatically take effect in April unless rescinded by both houses. To mask its inability to confront the deficit, Congress created the Gramm-Rudman guillotine, which arbitrarily cuts the budget if compromise fails...
...most important words in Bush's address remained the familiar cry of "no new taxes." That read-my-lips pledge from the campaign presented the President with what may prove an insoluble problem: how to meet the Gramm- Rudman target of a $100 billion deficit on his $1.16 trillion budget for fiscal year 1990. The commitment to comity with Congress ruled out the Reagan- era approach of proposing draconian, and politically unrealistic, cuts in domestic spending that would be immediately declared "dead on arrival." The familiar device of using overly optimistic economic assumptions to gild the budget was, of course...
With a certain amount of brio, Bush actually claims that his budget will produce a $92 billion deficit, $8 billion lower than the target. Were these numbers not so conspicuously off base, some economists would fear that slashing the current $170 billion deficit by $78 billion might send the economy into a tailspin...
...pregnant women and children. Bush courted environmentalists (by pledging an end to acid rain and toxic dumping) and borrowed lines from Jesse Jackson ("Keep hope alive"), while still echoing themes from the Reagan years ("growth and opportunity" and "family and faith") and bowing at the shrine of a balanced-budget amendment...
...then did the Bush team pull off such a miraculous deficit disappearing act? Budget Director Richard Darman came up with a solution so Machiavellian that it had eluded even that past master of cooked books, David Stockman. The Darman doctrine: If the numbers are inconvenient, let someone else add them up. It was a refined version of the same strategy that Bush himself promoted during his campaign with his numbers-fudging talk of a "flexible freeze...