Word: deficits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they really care about: What size budget should be balanced? One trillion? Two? Half a trillion? How much of the nation's wealth should remain in private hands, and how much controlled by the federal Treasury? Hardly anyone imagined the day would come when the brakes came off, the deficit vanished and it would be possible to balance the budget while spending even more, not less. "It was a little like winning the cold war," says Heritage Foundation vice president Stuart Butler, "and wondering, What...
...mighty surplus takes away the conservatives' most powerful weapon. In the campaign to roll back the welfare-state programs they hated, the deficit was an all-purpose weed whacker. Year after year, Republicans lived without big new tax cuts in return for the Democrats' giving up any hope of new spending. In that climate of discipline, the surplus took root. But it is much harder to keep those restraints in place when the Treasury seems awash in money. And those crowd-pleasing tax cuts? Though Republicans last week proposed a new capital-gains-tax reduction, it turns out the dreamy...
...When Bill Weld and I came into office in 1991, Massachusetts was in pretty rough shape," he said, pointing to high unemployment and a huge budget deficit. "I said then, 'It seems to me that we need to work with people already elected to office, Republican or Democrat....I think it's one of the reasons we were able to turn things around to quickly...
...When Bill Weld and I came into office in 1991, Massachusetts was in pretty rough shape," he said, pointing to high unemployment and a huge budget deficit. "I said then, 'It seems to me that we need to work with people already elected to office, Republican or Democrat.... I think it's one of the reasons we were able to turn things around to quickly...
...classic response to such a 1930s-type trap is a fiscal jump start: use deficit spending to get the economy moving, and hope that this gets investors investing and consumers consuming. But after years of ever widening deficits--Japan will run far and away the largest peacetime budget deficit in history this year--the economic engine still shows no sign of catching. True, official statistics say the economy grew an astonishing 1.9% in the first quarter, a number that has mystified observers who look at other indicators and see no evidence of a boom. But there is no sign...