Word: sin
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...only sin was that of trying to give the Nicaraguan people all that they deserve, at the same time we were fighting a war against U.S. aggression." With those words of justification for Nicaragua's shattered economy, President Daniel Ortega last week imposed a drastic austerity program that will slash the national budget by almost half and lay off nearly 35,000 public employees, including 10,000 army personnel and 13,000 members of the security police. The measures are aimed at stimulating production, almost at a standstill, and exports, which have been cut nearly in half...
...central questions are who pays and who gets. How a government taxes depends on its rulers' political philosophy. Had new revenues been required in a Democratic Administration, Michael Dukakis would surely have opted for increasing income taxes. Bush and Darman have already indicated their preference for increasing the regressive sin taxes. Had Bush honestly said, as did Dukakis, that he would raise taxes only as a "last resort," the country might have had a genuine debate...
...anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any Almodovar heroine...
...becomes more attractive: by default. "Everything else is worse," says economist Lester Thurow, dean of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. For instance, Congress will be loath to fiddle with personal income tax rates so soon after the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986. And while additional "sin" levies on alcohol and tobacco will be an option, they would raise far less revenue than a comparable gasoline-tax hike. At the same time, a national sales tax would be a complex experiment that lawmakers seem unlikely...
...just be diplomats having "full and frank discussions" during this week's demi-summit. Like a monk touring Las Vegas to understand what the fuss over sin is about, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev will travel to the mountaintop of conspicuous consumption and wretched excess: Trump Tower...