Word: tags
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...elderly and disabled, cost $4.6 billion. Medicaid, the medical-assistance program for the poor enacted simultaneously, cost $2.9 billion. This year the combined programs are expected to cost about $75 billion, or 9.5% of all federal spending. And in five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, that price tag is expected to climb 87%, to $142 billion, a rate twice that of all other federal spending. The chief causes of this upward spiral are longer life expectancies for Americans and medical-care costs that are rising 11% a year, nearly three times the rate of the Consumer Price Index...
...collecting. The papacy is, in fact, the world's oldest continuous art collector, and the history of its museums goes back to 1503, when Julius II set up a courtyard for connoisseurs, the Belvedere, stocked with a collection of antique statuary. Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts." Turnstile tallies were not a concern of Renaissance Popes. In the past 1,500 years or so, the Vatican has amassed vast amounts of art in a way that has oscillated between the ravenous and the haphazard. There...
...economic setbacks hit Japan. Last year only 2.4 million people used the ferries. The Japanese National Railways, already $78 billion in the red, balked at adding a bullet line that stood to lose still more. Meanwhile, 33 tunnel workers have died in accidents, and the original $1 billion price tag will have tripled by the end of the project. What to do with the tunnel when it is finally completed? One suggestion is to use it for oil storage. Another is to grow mushrooms in it. After all, the moisture and darkness would be ideal...
...industry with failing to innovate or serve consumer needs. Finally, in 1981 Osborne decided to produce his own personal computer. A year later the Osborne 1 appeared. Weighing only 24 lbs., it was packaged in a plastic case, could be tucked under an airline seat and carried a price tag of $1,795, including a valuable library of software. The erstwhile heckler had produced the first truly portable business computer...
Livelier preppy reading lies in Items from Our Catalog, a parody of the L. L. Bean mail order guide. The booklet offers such essential items as a Norweigan bulletproof sweater, a deerskin dieter's mask and the state of Maine--price tag $76,000,000 plus $3.20 postage. Lest you fear such outdoorsy materialism is not in the holiday spirit, note that the catalog also offers a down yarmulke and Thinsulite papal vestments...