Word: grammes
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Most landmark laws are signed in the Oval Office amid great hoopla, by a beaming President surrounded by self-promoting politicians grinning in the glare of television lights. But when Ronald Reagan penned his name on the Gramm-Rudman Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Reduction Control Act of 1985 last week, he did so without ceremony or cameras...
Though whittling down Big Government has been a favorite cause of Ronald Reagan's, Gramm-Rudman leaves the President in an awkward bind. By his own measure, his two greatest achievements since taking office have been building up America's defenses and cutting taxes. Yet Gramm-Rudman is all but certain to force him to cut defense spending or raise taxes, or both...
...official silence was, in a way, understandable. Few bills that cross a President's desk have the potential to reorder the national agenda or change the way Government does business. Gramm-Rudman has precisely such potential, but the force that drove it through Congress was an embarrassment, not something to crow about. For at heart, Gramm-Rudman, an amendment to a bill to raise the debt ceiling, is a statutory act of desperation, an admission that Government is incapable of governing itself...
After years of paying lip service to balanced budgets while racking up annual deficits approaching $200 billion, Congress and the White House have finally decided to fit themselves with a fiscal straitjacket. The bill, sponsored by Senate Republicans Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and by Democrat Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, compels Congress to vote to balance the budget within five years or face automatic cuts. "What % this bill does is put the fat in the fire," declared Gramm. "It forces decisions." Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, however, likened Congressmen voting for the bill...
...long-term impact on the economy is difficult to gauge. On Wall Street, the prospect of Gramm-Rudman's passage helped spark a stock-market rally that sent the Dow Jones industrial average surging past the 1500 mark on the hope that lower deficits will bring down interest rates and spur growth. But some leading economists castigated the budget-balancing bill in the most scathing terms imaginable. "It is," said Walter Heller, who served as President John Kennedy's chief economic adviser, "economically capricious, socially unfair, militarily risky, constitutionally questionable, politically irresponsible, procedurally perverse and administratively outlandish...