Word: surpluses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forecast is devastating for farmers who were just recovering from a decade of low prices and high interest rates. Silos full of surplus grain from past harvests will protect grocery shoppers from noticing much more than a modest increase in most food prices. With thousands of undernourished cattle and hogs being driven to the slaughterhouse, meat prices may even go down. But trading in the commodity pits of Chicago has been frantic, a new pot of gold for plungers who bet on feast or famine. This cursed drought has brought them a bonanza. Soybeans, for instance, are now selling...
More good news: the opportunity for conservation is considerable, considering the scale of profligacy now encouraged in Western agriculture. Throughout the region, scarce but subsidized water is inefficiently flooded onto marginal soil to raise crops like cotton and rice that are already in surplus and must often be bought at a loss by the Federal Government. A recent study, commissioned by Democratic Congressman George Miller of California, showed that fully a third of the Government's $535 million annual spending on irrigation water flows to farmers who receive other agricultural subsidies. Miller has introduced legislation to halt this double dipping...
...numbers cruncher end up having to impose $115 million in new taxes? Federal tax reform. To take advantage of the favorable capital-gains measures in the old law, taxpayers unloaded huge quantities of stocks and property in 1986. That boom in financial transactions gave Massachusetts a $140 million budget surplus in 1987. The bill came due this spring, when tax revenue from the windfall dried up and the state found itself in the red. Similar scenarios have unfolded in New York and California, where fellow Democrat Mario Cuomo and Republican George Deukmejian each face deficits in the neighborhood...
...Only this time the problem is not too little money but too much. Thanks to a series of increases in payroll taxes that began in 1984, the retirement trust fund currently takes in $109 million more each day than it pays out in benefits. Federal officials expect the accumulated surplus to exceed $100 billion by December and, in the next 40 years, to mushroom to $12 trillion. Every penny will be needed to pay for the future retirement of today's 24- to 42-year-olds, the budget-busting baby boomers. But as the stockpile grows, so does the urge...
...that is built so firmly into our social responses by now that we cannot, or will not, see its inherent strangeness. Mach is not just a fine-art version of the reclusive hobbyist who makes Eiffel Towers or Brooklyn Bridges from a million spent matches. He wants to turn surplus against itself -- not in the friendly way of Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg but with real bloody-mindedness. A Million Miles Away posits a world in which things are carried along, bobbing like corks, on a gross, value-free cataract of media imagery. The waves of magazines undulate with...