Word: spendthrift
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...whom Tacitus wrote: "He spent his days in sleeping, his nights in the enjoyment of life. That success which most men achieve by dint of hard work, he won by laziness. Yet unlike those prodigals who waste themselves and their substance alike, he was not regarded as either a spendthrift or a debauchee, but rather as a refined voluptuary...
Lleras also rebuilt his nation's international fiscal rating, driven into shabby disrepute by Spendthrift Rojas. He choked off unneeded imports so decisively that Colombia was one of five Latin American nations to show a 1958 favorable balance of trade in spite of tumbling prices of coffee, source of more than 80% of Colombia's export income. Lleras cut the $500 million commercial debt left by Rojas to $150 million. He also held down government spending and tightened credit. Cost of living, which jumped 23% in 1957, climbed only...
...late Ernst Emil Wiechert (1887-1950) was one of the last of a vanished breed of German writers-romantic in feeling, mystical in outlook, spendthrift in prose (in his 63 years he wrote 60 books, none of them very well known in the U.S.). When Hitler came to power, Wiechert backed one of the dictator's most detested internal enemies, Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, and paid for it with five months in Buchenwald concentration camp followed by years of enforced silence. Tidings, Wiechert's posthumous novel (first published in Germany in 1953) is the fruit of his musings...
...elected by the legislature two years after the end of the Kamehameha dynasty-ratified a reciprocal trade treaty with the U.S. in 1875, Hawaii boomed in earnest. But then, embroiled with a corrupt legislature and a Svengali-like adventurer, Kalakaua lost his grip; scandals raged as the spendthrift King kicked the public debt from $388,000 to $2,600,000 until, in 1887, he was forced to sign a new constitution stripping himself of his near-totalitarian powers...
Unpopular Task. Frondizi won office with Peronista votes, and his first political instinct was to repay the favor with such spendthrift sops as massive wage rises. But Frondizi, son of an Italian immigrant roadbuilder, is a responsible lawyer and political economist, and he soon made a different choice. He swapped Peronista support for army backing and began the dangerous, unpopular job of making Argentina live within its means. First, he coolly downgraded the ineffectual, sacred-cow national oil monopoly, by inviting foreign oilmen to develop Argentina's petroleum resources. The first new well came in last week, beginning...