Word: chop
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deficit. Huge chunks of the budget -- Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, which total more than $325 billion -- are granted automatically and do not require annual % reauthorization. Other spending measures, such as agricultural support programs ($26 billion), are politically sacrosanct. And while some Democrats might be ready to chop away at the $298 billion in defense spending, substantial Pentagon cuts would be unlikely under any Republican Administration. Thus, spending that is truly discretionary (read politically negotiable) amounts to less than 15% of the $1 trillion federal budget. Even if the President could manage to veto $150 billion of spending...
Russian is a language spoken with the hands, the eyebrows, an occasional shake of the head from side to side or a shrug of the shoulders. Gorbachev has mastered those gestures, and more. He may slice the air with a modified karate chop or spin his hands one over the other like a pinwheel, then extend them palms up in a gesture of vulnerability, only to clench them into fists a moment later. All the time his intense eyes lock onto a listener's. The eyes, he once told an audience in Prague, never lie. Much of his animation comes...
...given a new sense of urgency to congressional efforts to trim the federal budget. The fiscal 1988 budget calls for farm subsidies of $21 billion, down 6% from this year's, and the tentative deficit-cutting agreement reached two weeks ago by congressional and Administration leaders aims to chop out another $900 million. For many farmers, those federal payments can mean the difference between survival and failure. Montana farmers, for example, last year earned $303 million in net income but received $336 million in subsidies...
...disputes were smaller, though numerous. In the defense budget, the Republicans proposed a $4.9 billion cut from the 1988 inflation-adjusted level, while Democrats called for slicing $5.4 billion. The priorities were reversed in domestic spending categories such as Medicare benefits and farm subsidies, which the Republicans wanted to chop by $5.1 billion and the Democrats by $4.2 billion...
...campaign for the judge. Daniel Casey, executive director of the American Conservative Union, complained that he had urged the President to swing through the South to lobby for Bork during the dog days of summer. "Instead," griped Casey, "he was sent off to Santa Barbara for 30 days to chop wood and ride horses." Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley, a Reagan ally who voted for Bork on the Judiciary Committee, denounced the White House for being "asleep at the switch" last summer...