Word: triggered
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...party-line passage on George W. Bush's $900-odd billion marginal rate reductions, a major pocket of bipartisan opposition to the President's overall tax-cut plan reared its head in the Senate. A centrist clutch of five Republicans and six Democrats banded together Wednesday and demanded a trigger - a legislative clause that would halt tax cuts if the government ran out of surpluses - as the first condition of their support...
...Bush can blame Alan Greenspan for this one. The trigger was something the Fed head spoke of approvingly in his January testimony before the Senate. It was lost in the fireworks of a rather shockingly hearty endorsement of using tax cuts to drain off unwanted surpluses, but with Greenspan cutting back on his cheerleading and the Democrats feeling their oats, the idea has returned...
...spending trigger...
...about how it gets balanced. Congress has shown unequivocally over the past few years that there's no budget legislation it can't creatively account its way around, and no bit of pork it can resist squeezing in for the folks back home. Imagine what would happen with a "trigger" giving representatives more or less explicit permission...
...want a safety net? Try 2002, or 2004, or 2008 or 2012. The U.S. government already has a trigger - it's called an election. And if Bush's tax cut starts to run up deficits because either it or the rest of the budget is too expensive for the economy it depends on, politicians on both sides of the aisle will have plenty of opportunities to figure out which they want to trim...