Word: reaganized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Government by Symbolism. Reagan was a master at this, and Bush has proved a very quick study. When the Supreme Court last July ruled that the burning of the U.S. flag qualified as protected free speech under the First Amendment, Bush and his advisers organized a media event before the Iwo Jima memorial in Washington so the President could call for a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. Congress shied away from an amendment, but last week it passed a simple criminal law that would impose a jail term of up to one year on anyone who burned the flag...
Such high jinks are symptomatic of much broader problems that have both caused and accelerated the emasculation of Government. Washington has been at a political impasse since Reagan's first term, when Congress -- Republicans as well as Democrats -- refused to let him gut popular domestic programs to pay for his huge tax cuts. Instead, the Government decided to have it both ways: tax reduction as well as big boosts in defense spending and increasing middle- class entitlements (notably Social Security and farm supports), offset to a small degree by cuts in programs for the poor. The resulting deficit spending...
...Federal Government is suffering from malnutrition. The Administration still has not nominated anyone for 77 senior Cabinet department positions. The Departments of Interior, Education, Labor and Health and Human Services have become nearly invisible.The Federal Aviation Administration's staff is still well below the level that existed before Reagan fired striking air controllers in 1981 and is using outmoded equipment to track near gridlock in the skies...
...dangerous deterioration of Government-run nuclear-weapons plants, and the department is currently dragging its heels on an estimated $150 billion effort to get the program back into shape. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, new Secretary Jack Kemp is busy mopping up after eight years of Reagan-era mismanagement and scandal. The losses are running beyond $4 billion...
...spending and creating new bureaucracies." Yet the Government does still spend mightily where it has a mind to. The Pentagon has done some tactical trimming but remains the biggest Government consumer of all. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney is determined to retain as much as possible of the $2.4 trillion Reagan-era buildup -- including a scaled-down Star Wars program, at about $4 billion; the B-2 bomber, at $535 million each; and the Advanced Tactical Fighter, projected at $65 million each...