Word: stockmans
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...fight over that proposal is likely to make the battle over credit guarantees look like a warm-up skirmish. To Stockman and Secretary of Agriculture John Block, the current farm troubles are a sign that 52 years of heavy Government involvement in agriculture have led both farmers and taxpayers to a dead end. Rural prosperity, they believe, can be rebuilt in the long run only by a long-overdue and surely painful transition to a leaner system that forces farmers to compete with little Government aid in markets at home and abroad. Says Block: "This country can no longer afford...
...Stockman got off to a reverse-English start in selling this program by privately proposing a "contract" to influential Senators: their pledge to vote for the bill in return for the change in loan-guarantee rules that the Administration announced last week. The Senators not only refused but threw at him the same "blackmail" charge he later made to the Budget Committee. Serious debate on the farm bill will probably not begin until late summer, and then it will be enmeshed with the fight over the sweeping cuts in government spending for other domestic programs that the Administration is proposing...
...full farm-policy changes the Administration seeks are probably too drastic for Congress to accept in this session. But Reagan, Block and Stockman have at least opened a debate going well beyond the usual wrangles over so many cents per bushel to the fundamentals of farm policy. Should its goal be to keep farmers in business or to produce an industry able to compete in world markets, and in an era of $200 billion budget deficits, how much can taxpayers reasonably be required to shell out? In that debate, the opponents can muster plenty of humanitarian emotion, but the Administration...
Before a stunned Senate committee last week, Budget Director David Stockman, his voice full of scorn, derided the excesses of the military retirement system. "It's a scandal; it's an outrage," he said, adding that "institutional forces in the military are more concerned about protecting their retirement benefits than they are about protecting the security of the American people." Declared Stockman: "When push comes to shove, they'll give up on security before they'll give up on retirement...
Then, like a general who seizes his enemies' weapons and turns them against his foes, Stockman grabbed some labeled boxes brought into the hearing room by Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, who had planned to use them as props for an attack on the President's budget. Brandishing one that carried the word VETERANS in black letters on its side, Stockman suggested that the $18 billion military pension plan, which covers 1.3 million military retirees, is an expenditure that could go on the congressional chopping block. "I'll probably be in hot water for saying it," Stockman confessed...