Word: legerdemain
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...power-the citizen's income of today-is not sufficient to drive the economic system at higher speed." Thus the program itself was founded on the old pump-priming theory with five billions in cash and credit to do the trick. By various bits of legal and financial legerdemain the net cost to the taxpayer was described hopefully as a mere billion and a half. According to the President this would provide him with the "three rounds" of ammunition needed to down Depression...
...chief interests are chronic indigestion and listening to the Whoops Family on the radio. But Lucy realizes that the only way to keep Irene from booming young Senator Keane (Victor Jory) into a Presidential threat is to inaugurate a rival boom for Irene's husband. Last-minute legerdemain with a previous marriage of Irene's cuts short the boomeranging boom by intimating that, as husband of a woman whose foreign divorce has no legal standing, Justice Hibbard has been living in sin for ten years...
Recalling that Dictator Stalin officially "claimed a quantitative fulfillment of 93.7%" for the First Five-Year Plan, Mr. Lyons analyzes in a chapter the figures on which this is based, discusses many a "cute piece of arithmetical legerdemain" used by Kremlin economists. "That the Plan has been accepted even by hostile capitalist economists as on the whole 'successful' shows the gullibility and naivete of those who deal in cold figures instead of living realities...
...dubbed Bishop Moore "Biscuit" or "Wangi Bischoff" (Yankee bishop). For the trombone they could think of no descriptive word. A practiced sleight-of-hand artist who claims he once could do with one hand a flag trick which Magician Howard Thurston needed two to perform, Song Man Rodeheaver performed legerdemain for the Africans, taking care not to let them think that magic had anything to do with...
There is no question that Railroads, or some of them, or most of them, have been badly run in the past. There has been a tremendous amount of financial legerdemain. Their stock has been watered. The managers have been known to have deliberately debased the value of the stock in their companies, in order to make speculative profits on the market. It is even reasonable to say that this mismanagement has resulted in the present financial condition of Railroads, in that they are still paying interest on capital which was filched from them, in one way or another...