Word: darman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when congressional leaders and the Bush Administration began putting together a deal. The President's goal was to keep his read-my-lips campaign promise of "no new taxes." Congressional leaders wanted to appear to meet deficit-reduction targets without cutting any politically popular spending programs. Budget director Richard Darman came up with a solution that was simple -- too simple. A cut in the capital-gains tax would at least temporarily raise money to cover the revenue shortfall. Many Democrats at first supported the plan that looked like all gain, no pain...
Around Labor Day, however, the consensus that Darman had put together began to fall apart. "Everything was going along swimmingly," explains an Administration official, "until the drug plan came out of nowhere, and then capital gains became partisan instead of the easy way out." The battle against drugs meant new spending, and Democrats began attacking a capital- gains cut as a Republican tax goody for the rich and famous...
...Richard Darman '66, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, met with House Appropriations Committee chair Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.) on the relief package and said he didn't see a showdown brewing...
...This isn't being approached on that basis. Everybody appreciates that it is a national disaster and that we've got to address it. We're trying to do it as best we can on the merits on a bipartisan basis," Darman said...
...Darman's observation -- oddly reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's much maligned 1979 "malaise" speech on the nation's shrinking horizons -- was acute. But even as he was speaking, Darman and others in Government were obscuring the size of the federal deficit through slick bookkeeping and legislative tricks and promising bold new programs that they knew the federal budget could not sustain...