Word: democratic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...subcommittee's chairman, Georgia Democrat Doug Barnard Jr., says the IRS has become so consumed with preserving its reputation that it is using Section 6103's confidentiality provisions to thwart congressional scrutiny of alleged misconduct. Citing Section 6103, IRS officials have refused to turn over confidential files about the Jordache affair and other cases. "We are handicapped from doing the oversight job that Congress has determined we should do," says Barnard, a conservative former banker...
...around the impasse would be for the powerful House Ways and Means Committee to obtain the records, as it is empowered to do under Section 6103. But the committee's influential chairman, Illinois Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, has not cooperated, apparently out of concern that embarrassing disclosures about the IRS could damage its ability to collect taxes...
...rates, which make the dollar attractive to foreign investors, and the political woes of West Germany and Japan. The Japanese have yet to pick a successor to Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who announced his resignation in April over a stock scandal; in West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat Union has lost two important local elections this year. Moreover, even though the yield on such securities as ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds has slipped from 9.2% earlier this month to 8.8% last week, it remains higher than the return on comparable securities abroad...
...perhaps the strongest action yet, Senator Albert Gore last week introduced a bill that would empower local communities to set rates for basic cable services. To increase competition among cable-system operators, the Tennessee Democrat would allow telephone companies to enter the cable business. In addition, the bill asked the Federal Communications Commission to study the cross-ownership of cable networks and systems by the same companies. Said Gore, a frequent critic of the cable industry: "Deregulation has allowed too many cable companies to gouge consumers and left too many consumers as unprotected victims...
Critics of cable have attacked the present industry arrangements on several fronts in Washington. The measures include a bill introduced last month by Ohio Democrat Howard Metzenbaum, chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, that would limit the number of subscribers that any system operator could control to 25% of the total U.S. cable audience. The FCC, meanwhile, is preparing a report on the impact of cable deregulation that is due out next year. In a separate action, the agency has begun reviewing a rule that bars broadcast networks from owning cable systems. The networks already have interests in cable channels...