Word: budgeteering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...budget, Labor's first serious salvo in a campaign for the election that Prime Minister James Callaghan may call as early as this fall, was supposed to offer something for everybody-as indeed it very nearly did. The beetle-browed Healey, who once urged that the government raise taxes on wealthier Britons "until the pips squeak," was all smiles and charity this time. "I do not call for any sacrifices," he said. Indeed, the budget increased old-age pensions, froze the price of school lunches and ordered free milk for kids aged seven to eleven. That was a tweak...
...trouble was that Healey's fine-tuning of the budget seems to have been so carefully calibrated that few could get excited about it-and the British get more excited about budgets than most people. "Too cautious," groused a Trades Union Congress chieftain. "Politically timid," grumbled Confederation of British Industry President John Greenborough. Healey himself was partly to blame. Expansive and voluble, he is given to flights of optimism. For example, he has predicted a drop in the inflation rate this year to 7%-down from the present 9.1% rate and a peak of 26% three years...
...Tories, for their part, are faced with trying to salvage a situation in which Labor walked off with their ace card: tax cuts. Said Thatcher of Healey's budget: "His conversion to tax cuts is election-deep." Already the Tories are crying that the Callaghan-Healey largesse did not go far enough. Laborites also concede that Thatcher unleashed a powerful issue in immigration. Observes Home Secretary Merlyn Rees: "She lost the Asian vote, but she gained the British working class...
Cutting the federal budget is an alternative that Washington is not yet vigorously pursuing; right now all the pressures are to add a billion here and there. Nonetheless, there are ideas, of widely varying reasonableness. Some conservatives would shrink foreign aid, welfare, Social Security benefits. Alan Greenspan suggests reducing expenditures for public service employment of the jobless, a most dubious economy. Rudolph Penner, director of tax policy studies of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, more sensibly would pare the roughly $68 billion in federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments, many of which...
...standard target of liberal Democrats is the defense budget, which has leaped from $74.5 billion in fiscal 1973 to $117.8 billion budgeted for fiscal 1979, largely because of increased personnel costs. A presidential panel last week recommended reform of exorbitant military pensions. Now, a 20-year veteran can retire at 37 and draw a full pension for the rest of his life. Thomas V. Jones, chairman of Northrop, a major defense contractor, charges that the Pentagon and its suppliers have come to accept cost overruns as a way of life. He urges that the Defense Department sign fixed-price contracts...