Word: scheme
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this package sounds familiar, there's a reason. It's a pale twin of the President's February 1995 budget, the timid postelection plan that launched this yearlong roller-coaster ride in the first place. But there is one new wrinkle: with tax cuts up front, Gingrich's scheme could very well increase the deficit in the next two years, then leave it hovering near $200 billion thereafter...
...certain threshold: for example, above $36,000 for a family of four. (And families below that threshold would pay no income tax.) But it is almost impossible to sort out fully the economic burdens that would result from the system's new rules. This much seems clear: the scheme Forbes is pushing in his television ads looks as if it would either swell the federal deficit or raise taxes on middle Americans while bestowing extra riches on the rich...
...that's true, the flat tax would collect less money than the current system, at least in the short term. Robert Hall, a conservative Stanford University economist, who with his colleague Alvin Rabushka literally wrote the book on the subject (The Flat Tax, 1985), estimates that Forbes' scheme would widen the federal deficit by $182 billion a year--just when a majority of voters in both parties say they want a balanced budget before new tax cuts. Forbes, a believer in the quasi-theology called supply-side economics, assumes that tax cuts, even when financed by federal borrowing, will generate...
Forbes' rise in the polls has led to a case of me-tooism among his G.O.P. rivals, several of whom quickly announced their flat-tax plans last week even while attacking Forbes' scheme as favoring, in Pat Buchanan's barb, "the boys down at the yacht basin." Buchanan and Senator Phil Gramm offered single-rate tax plans that would retain the popular deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions and would tax investment income. A long-shot candidate, self-made tire magnate Morry Taylor, asks why Forbes would charge him nothing on the $15 million he collected last year...
...House Republican freshman class--a dialogue that California Democrat Gary Condit describes as "very enlightening to us. They're not as rigid as they're portrayed to be." As the White House negotiations broke down, Armey announced that the Republican leadership was ready to turn to Plan B. The scheme: if they couldn't cut a deal with Clinton, they would turn to the Blue Dogs to come up with a budget that could pass over the President's veto and render him irrelevant. The Republicans' latest offer--embracing the Blue Dogs' Medicare and Medicaid numbers--signaled that the G.O.P...