Word: taxingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Great American Budget Battle, Washington's answer to professional wrestling, has officially begun, all roars and growls and theatrical blows to the head. This week Congress will send the President a $792 billion tax-cut bill; he has promised to stomp on it. Clinton has pushed a $300 billion spending program, including a new prescription-drug program for Medicare; congressional fists are already clenched. There is talk of grand ideological warfare, of reckless spendthrift Democrats and reckless plutocrat-loving Republicans fighting over how to divvy up the glorious $3 trillion surplus. In this season's budget politics, much...
...then there's less extra money to pay down the debt. Republican proposals so far, rather than cutting spending, would increase it next year about $25 billion, which more than wipes out next year's projected $14 billion surplus. The only place to find that money is to raise taxes (the White House still loves a tobacco tax) or raid Social Security, as lawmakers have routinely done for years...
...that by every indication, voters don't think it really exists either. But that has not prevented politicians on both sides from trying to woo them with proposals that Washington can't pay for. Republicans fanned out during their August recess to try to rally public support for their tax cuts--Please, let us give you more money!--but the polls showed a public unmoved. Voters said they would rather use the money, if it exists, to pay down the $5.6 trillion national debt. "People are genuinely fiscally conservative in this country," says Stephen Moore, an irrepressible supply-sider from...
Last week House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Lott acknowledged that the tax cut was dead for 1999. Unlike some G.O.P. moderates, Lott claimed he wasn't interested in a compromise--a little more spending for Clinton, a smaller tax cut for the G.O.P. Better to have the issue to take to voters next year. That suits most Democrats fine: Al Gore never misses a chance to denounce the G.O.P.'s "risky tax-cut scheme" and to promise that education and health care would have priority over tax cuts if the Democrats had their way. The only Democrat...
...Carney says. "It?s become a much bigger issue since the ?94, ?96 and ?98 campaigns, but there are still some Democrats who?re happy to vote for reform as long as it?s doomed to fail." (Kind of like the moderate Republicans who voted for that $792 billion tax cut that arrived DOA at the White House yesterday.) McCain has made a career - and the beginnings of a decent presidential run ?- by being the kind of guy who exposes hypocrisy on the Hill. He may find more of it this time than he?s bargaining...