Word: ranking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plan was a politician's worst nightmare. With midterm elections looming in less than a month, rank-and-file members of Congress were being asked to endorse the unpalatable idea that voters should pay more taxes while receiving less in the way of public services. Faced with that painful -- albeit necessary -- proposition, the lawmakers simply cut and ran, ignoring Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's admonition that "failure to enact the agreement would produce an adverse reaction in financial markets that could undercut our economy...
...bankers were starting at the sight of their own shadows. So deposit insurance could be done painlessly for decades because bankers were too terrified to do anything resembling making a bad loan. It was not until a generational shift occurred in the '70s that bankers prepared to entertain really rank loans. The government had this free ride for a long time. There were hardly any failures because bankers were not lending in such a way as to fail. And now, paradoxically, when the talk is of cutting back on deposit insurance, the banking system is a mirror image...
Later is now. And as the budget debacle in Washington demonstrated, Darman still has found no way to repair the fiscal fiasco that he, as much as anyone else, helped create. Last week, after more than five months of closed-door negotiations, he watched as timorous rank-and-file House members defeated a painfully crafted deficit-cutting deal worth $500 billion over five years. For once, Darman's goals had been economically laudatory, even politically reasonable. He had wanted to solve the deficit problem by shifting the government onto a healthier diet of lower borrowing. He had envisioned...
...whim of Communist bureaucrats, who confiscated tens of thousands of churches and mosques. Charitable and pastoral work beyond church walls was forbidden, while atheists had power to meddle in church affairs and propagandize against belief in God in schools and the media. Seminary training was severely restricted, and rank-and-file clergy were even cut off from formal food privileges. No faith could conduct religious education of children...
...deadline for the $100 billion sequestration had raised the pressure to such suffocating levels that politics should have been choked out of the equation. Instead the negotiations grumped into the weekend amid fears that the pact made at the top might be undone by the congressional rank and file...