Word: sacrosanct
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...seems ready to embark on the greatest frenzy of antidrug votes since the last election year, 1986. The Senate unanimously approved an amendment to the annual budget resolution that would provide for a $2.6 billion expansion of the Government's antidrug | efforts. In doing so, it busted the supposedly sacrosanct spending targets negotiated with the White House last year. The Senate also voted to impose sanctions against Mexico for failing to be sufficiently vigilant in arresting the flow of drugs across its border into the U.S. If the House concurs, it would mark the first time Congress has invoked...
...would have only a negligible impact on the deficit. Huge chunks of the budget -- Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, which total more than $325 billion -- are granted automatically and do not require annual % reauthorization. Other spending measures, such as agricultural support programs ($26 billion), are politically sacrosanct. And while some Democrats might be ready to chop away at the $298 billion in defense spending, substantial Pentagon cuts would be unlikely under any Republican Administration. Thus, spending that is truly discretionary (read politically negotiable) amounts to less than 15% of the $1 trillion federal budget. Even if the President...
America's biggest tax incentive to spend may be the unlimited deduction on mortgage interest. This sacrosanct loophole has fulfilled the worthwhile ideal of widespread home ownership, especially for first timers, but has encouraged people to make disproportionately large investments in housing instead of putting their money into the savings pool. Most other industrial countries impose limits on the mortgage interest that can be deducted. The U.S. mortgage-deductibility provision, contends Economic Commentator Robert Kuttner, is not only antisaving, but inflationary and inequitable as well. Wrote Kuttner in his 1984 book The Economic Illusion: "The effect is to fuel ; housing...
...unseasonal nuptial rush has more to do with finance than with passion. To cut some $1.7 billion from the estimated 1988 budget deficit of $8.7 billion, the country's coalition Socialist-conservative government is not only slashing some formerly sacrosanct social benefits but, as of January 1988, dropping the $1,350 wedding bonus that Austrian couples were traditionally given to help them get started in married life...
...checks as their due, a return on their payroll-tax contributions to the Social Security trust fund over the years. They see Social Security as an insurance rather than a welfare program, and this attitude has made benefits virtually unassailable by cost cutters. To ensure that the program remains sacrosanct, it is watched over by an enormous lobby: some 110 organizations that claim to represent approximately 50 million members. The forces behind Social Security are so strong that when Ronald Reagan proposed cutting Social Security benefits in 1981, the Republican- controlled Senate slapped him down by a vote...