Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Under Ronald Reagan, a conservative who had earlier inveighed against federal red ink from any soapbox he could find, the U.S. went from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor. When Reagan took office, the budget deficit was about $74 billion, and the national debt (i.e., the sum of all previous deficits) was nearly $1 trillion. In three years the deficit had soared to $200 billion; and when George Bush steps down, he will leave behind a projected fiscal 1993 deficit of about $340 billion. Today interest on the debt consumes...
...before deciding whether new deficit spending is needed. In any case, he insists, he will seek long-term deficit reduction as well as new public investments in education, job training and public works. But new spending will be easier to accomplish if it is simply borrowed from future generations, Reagan-Bush style, rather than painfully extracted from existing programs...
...computers that had whirred quietly for years started making the strangest sounds. Some began to moo like a cow every hour on the hour. Others greeted each new program with the sound of breaking glass. Still others spent their spare moments doing celebrity impersonations: Ed McMahon belly laughing, Ronald Reagan mumbling, "Well . . .," George Bush advising that a particular keystroke "wouldn't be prudent" or Star Trek's Dr. McCoy spluttering, "Dammit...
...spent the past eight years wandering in the political wilderness. After Ronald Reagan routed Walter Mondale in 1984, From and a group of mostly Southern Democrats organized the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.). The group wanted to yank the party to the right, certain that Democrats could regain the White House only with fewer appeals to special interests and more to the predominantly white, politically moderate, middle- class voters. Pundits predicted the council's early demise, and Jesse Jackson derided it as "the Southern White Boys Club." But its diagnosis of the party's ills seemed to be borne...
...some wealthy neighbors are sneering about "our tax dollars at play." Huffed one neighbor: "Have you seen the Porta Potties along Padaro Lane?" Others carp that on the $200,000 salary Clinton will earn as President, he is not rich enough to buy a house in the area. Ronald Reagan, of course, lived up the road, but at least he wasn't a Democrat. Sighed a jaded millionaire as Clinton departed: "We survived Carter, and we'll survive...