Word: scoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...matter which team they've got," said outgoing Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. With deficits returning, the new Treasury Secretary's confirmation hearings are certain to become a forum for Bush's critics, who say he has tossed aside fiscal discipline to give handouts to the wealthy. Administration officials scoff. Says a senior aide: "Show me somewhere in history where someone has paid a political price for deficits." That's exactly the kind of talk that could spook the bond markets. So while it's easy to write off Lindsey and O'Neill as bunglers, they may not be such...
Anyone who has ever walked past a McDonald's and smelled that delectable grease should know it's a house of gastronomic excess. No food establishment that leaves your fingers glistening and your clothes smelling like sizzled meat can be good for you. So it's tempting to scoff at the lawsuit heard in a Manhattan court last week on behalf of overweight New Yorkers who say McDonald's food made them fat. And scoff folks did--on chat shows, in the papers, even overseas. "Perhaps they should also take out a lawsuit against staff for saying 'Have a nice...
When skeptical listeners scoff at Kurzweil's sci-fi predictions, saying, "Oh, we won't see that for 100 years," he points out that when it comes to "innovation time," 100 years melts down to about 25. That's because, as he says, "our rate of exponential growth is growing exponentially." Evolution accelerates: it took 100 million years for the human brain to develop, but computing power is expected to surpass it within a generation. "By 2040 or 2050 nonbiological intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence," he says...
...rigueur for the Harvardian intelligentsia to scoff at supply-side economics. But tax cuts are not the sinister sires of deficits that liberals claim they are. Low taxes provide incentives to work, save and invest. That means growth, and growth coupled with fiscal restraint means higher tax revenue. For evidence, one need only consult the historical record. Between 1961 and 1968, following the Kennedy tax cut, the economy grew by 42 percent and tax revenue rose by a third. The Reagan tax-cut, so fashionably maligned, brought a similar boom. The deficits of the 1980s resulted from spending run rampant...
...unfortunate as it may be to local vendors, the port city of Sihanoukville on the southwest tip of Cambodia remains underwhelmed by tourists, and it is that sense of peace that makes a weekend here worth the modest cost of the stay. Guidebooks scoff that there's nothing to do?it's difficult to even find an Internet connection, they harrumph?but that is precisely the point. Everything else to do in Cambodia requires hiking and studying and getting up early; Sihanoukville is for the lazy or those suffering from temple overload. The four-hour, $3 bus trip from Phnom...