Word: excessive
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Proxmire began awarding a Golden Fleece each month to an example of government excess. Recipients included the Commerce Department for a $28,000 study of the best surfing beaches in Honolulu, and the Economic Development Administration for spending $20,000 to build a replica of the Great Wall of China in Indiana. My favorite fleece-because I did the research for it-was for $6,000 the Army spent funding a 17-page study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce. Prox told reporters that whoever dreamed up that project "must have been on the sauce...
...past, Lee has not been shy about singling out those nations (the Philippines has been a favorite target) in which an excess of democracy's messiness - as he might put it - has tempered steady economic progress and the betterment of the life chances of ordinary folk. But the strength of his argument does not rest only on other nations' failures. Above all, it is bolstered by Singapore's success. For as any visitor can attest, the scale of what Lee and his colleagues have achieved by applying his principles - in what Singaporean academic and fiction writer Catherine Lim has described...
Since the time of the Vikings, the British love of getting sozzled has been a source of pride as much as embarrassment--falling somewhere between bland cuisine and stiff upper lips on the list of distinguishing national characteristics. But these days, that excess isn't so endearing as levels of concern about boozing have reached heights not seen since Victorians decried the evils of cheap gin. Unlike most of their Continental counterparts, whose consumption is falling, the British are drinking more than ever--9.6 L of pure alcohol per person last year, which is 42% more than the amount consumed...
Alcohol experts think the government could be a lot more influential if it had the guts to take on the liquor industry and voters who whinge about the nanny state. Those experts say there's good evidence that what works best to curb excess drinking is higher taxes on alcohol, lowering the number and density of places to buy booze and instituting a robust policy of random breath-alcohol testing for drivers. But across Europe--the hardest-drinking region in the world--almost all governments, including Britain's, prefer responsible-drinking campaigns premised on the idea that trouble flows from...
...Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the topics of diversity and affirmative action, but these are brief escapes from the banality and incoherence of quotations from anonymous current students. Multiply the Harvard section by seven for each its sibling institutions and you have a sense of the excess of the project. It is unlikely that “Untangling the Ivy League: 2006” will help more than a few students narrow down their decisions between Ivy League schools without having to visit campuses, but the book is not entirely deplorable. Zawel, if nothing else, has given...