Word: deficit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that Congressmen will go to extremes to duck accountability. The only way 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military bases was first to appoint a commission whose recommendations will automatically take effect in April unless rescinded by both houses.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...
...three 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...
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...
...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...
Dukakis' overall spending plan of $13.4 billion has been criticized by legislative leaders, who have asked the governor to submit a smaller budget in light of the state's current $636 million deficit. million deficit...