Word: smoot
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While Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats mull an auto-industry bailout plan, it's worth recalling a pair of Republican legislators from the past. One of the most derided pieces of 20th century economic policy was introduced by Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Representative Willis C. Hawley of Oregon. Signed into law on June 17, 1930, the notorious Smoot-Hawley Act jacked up U.S. tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods, sparking a global trade war that deepened the Great Depression at home and spread it abroad...
Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression - a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill...
...that it was global. The combined output of the world's seven biggest economies declined nearly 20% from 1929 to 1932. The unemployment rate soared in the U.S. and Germany to a peak above 33%. World trade collapsed by two-thirds, not least because of retaliation to the Smoot-Hawley tariff...
Scenes of exquisite boredom at school, as the teachers drone on about such traditional crowd pleasers as the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. Scenes of exquisite calculation at home, as Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) fakes an illness that will spare his fine intelligence another assault by the proponents of useless information. Ferris is no ordinary truant. The point of his exercise is not to waste the day but to spend it wisely. Or wise-guyly. So he will spring his best girl (Mia Sara) from school. He will get his best friend (Alan Ruck, who is lovely as a boy struggling...
...Crimson does. In reality, I'm also inclined to doubt that the Wiley Wildcats always got to argue in the affirmative for Civil Disobedience and against Segregated Education as they do here. If memory serves, debaters in the past often had to snore their way through matters like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff...