Word: reductionism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ross Perot was a bit tired. For months he had been traveling and making TV appearances at a more frenetic pace than when he was running for President, so he had been planning to take a break. Instead he abruptly decided to rush to Washington last Thursday to fulminate on...
The government's voluntary Public Debt Reduction Fund has not been popular (316 contributors in 1992), but it works without raising taxes or cutting spending -- and the gifts are tax deductible!
It is not inconceivable that they had serious misgivings about the plan's heavy reliance on taxes and loose calculations of spending cuts; yet they felt that some deficit reduction, through dubious (and perhaps deleterious) methods, is better than no deficit reduction and continued gridlock.
In the end a politician does vote up or down on a measure; but a simple yes-or-no, in this case on Clinton's massive deficit reduction package, does not capture what concessions a particular lawmaker wrung with his or her vote, what misgivings he or she expressed, and...
But perhaps asserting that these Democratic defectors were only trying to differentiate themselves from the die-hard supporters of the deficit-reduction package is to give them too much credit.