Word: budgeteering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Tories will trim $3 billion from the Labor government's last budget, including aid to local governments for public housing and other programs. But Thatcher's Social Services Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, later offered a supplement to the budget that provided unexpectedly large increases in such personal benefits as old age pensions and maternity allowances. That calculated benevolence may not be of much help to many Britons as they try to cope with a new round of inflation...
Jenkin candidly admitted that the new budget will result in an increase of the annual rate from 10.3% to 17.5% by next November. Thus many who will benefit from the changed tax structure may find their gains eroded by higher inflation...
Labor politicians and their allies in the trades unions were appalled by the budget. Former Prime Minister James Callaghan called it "unfair, unjust, inflationary-a reckless gamble." Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, anticipating a bitter round of contract negotiations and possible strikes at the end of the year, warned that "Britain faces a winter of discontent that would dwarf in its intensity anything we have known in the past...
Indeed, the threat of trouble from the unions put a damper even on businessmen's enthusiasm for the budget. One wealthy corporate executive called home to tell his wife to lay in an ample supply of gas for their camping stove, lest there be no fuel next winter in their Kensington flat. And in the two days after Howe delivered his budget message to Commons, the Financial Times stock index dropped 27 points. The Tories stoutly defended their drastic action. "This is a severe package," conceded John Biffen, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. "But the severity is made necessary...
...import duties and trimmed taxes on business profits and agricultural exports. Private managers have been put in charge of money-losing state corporations, and the government has reduced the free and subsidized rice and flour distributions that ate up more than 30% of the previous regime's annual budget. Foreign investment is now running at about $40 million a year, 13 times the level seen in the last year of the former government. Sri Lanka, in short, is experiencing creeping capitalism. Says Jayawardene, a lawyer: "The developing world is now giving up controls. Not only us. They...