Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Have pity on the Republicans in Congress. While their leaders were holding a press event under a large 'Stop Robbing Social Security' banner, their own accountants were wistfully admitting that the GOP budget would in fact be "robbing Social Security" to the tune of $7.6 billion next year. The Congressional Budget Office, using more respectable accounting, calculated an even higher number of about $18 billion. Faced with that kind of shortfall, the Congressional Republicans chose a desperate and despicable strategy: fix the numbers, and let any attendant suffering fall on the poor...
...pledged so often to balance the non-Social Security budget and stay within preset spending caps that something had to be done. With defense and highway spending on the rise, the brunt of the cuts fell on health, education, and social service programs, but billions of dollars still remained to be accounted...
...first technique the House leadership employed was to take perfectly predictable expenses, like planned defense appropriations and the 2000 Census, and call them "emergency" spending, which is outside the caps (but still must come from other revenues, like Social Security). With the second technique, known as "directed scorekeeping"--described by one Federal budget expert in private practice as "lying about the numbers"--they were able to get rid of over half of the remaining deficit...
...year. This means that the payments for October, November, and December of the year 2000 would go on the fiscal year 2001 budget, turning about $9 billion in costs into the next Congress' problem. That means that GOP leaders can claim to have a $400 million surplus without touching Social Security, as long as no one looks at next year's books...
...Republican Party is also referred to as the conservative party and this is another reason why Buchanan does not belong in its midst. The word conservative should connote a certain skepticism about the efficiency of government and its ability to solve social problems. Many of Buchanan's views are more fundamentalist than conservative--he seems to have incredible faith in the government's ability to implement its programs...