Word: terme
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such high jinks are symptomatic of much broader problems that have both caused and accelerated the emasculation of Government. Washington has been at a political impasse since Reagan's first term, when Congress -- Republicans as well as Democrats -- refused to let him gut popular domestic programs to pay for his huge tax cuts. Instead, the Government decided to have it both ways: tax reduction as well as big boosts in defense spending and increasing middle- class entitlements (notably Social Security and farm supports), offset to a small degree by cuts in programs for the poor. The resulting deficit spending...
...long-term goals, beyond hoping for a "kinder, gentler" nation, have been lost in a miasma of public relations stunts. The President's recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s...
...White House might empower one body -- most logically the President's Council on Environmental Quality -- to coordinate environmental policy and to apply tough standards throughout the Government. Partly because it has no such mechanism, the Bush Administration's record has often seemed to reflect the short-term interests of the business community rather than presidential promises to provide international leadership. For example, some African | nations were outraged last spring when the U.S. seemed to be dragging its feet on a convention limiting the dumping of toxic wastes on the shores of developing countries...
...protect the earth's ecological balance." Just a month earlier, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, representing the major economic powers, had called upon "all relevant national, regional and international organizations" of its 24 member states to take a "vigilant, serious and realistic" look at "balancing long- term environmental costs and benefits against near-term economic growth...
...part of the world's haves and increased assistance to the have-nots. Today a billion people live in a degree of squalor that forces them to deplete the environment without regard to its future. Similarly, their governments often are too crippled by international debt to afford the short-term costs of ecological prudence. Says Benedick: "Protecting the global environment is inextricably linked with eliminating poverty...