Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Debating Detroit I applaud TIME's decision to spend a year in Detroit looking at the city's and region's challenges and efforts at revitalization [Oct. 5]. However, I find it curious that you start intensive research into the city with an opinion piece by a resident of New York who left Michigan four decades ago. With all due respect to the acclaimed Daniel Okrent, simply reciting old grievances repeatedly rejected by voters, such as my having "resisted ... more stringent mileage standards," seems counterintuitive to the magazine's mission. I would ask that Okrent take another look...
...give us the lives and voices of some regular Indian and Pakistani worshippers without judgment, speculation or high-flown abstraction. He just sets the scene around them, presents some historical background and lets them tell their stories. A prison warden explains how he takes off two months every year to become (along with a waiter, a bus conductor and a man who collects coconut juice) a divinely possessed dancer. A Tibetan monk recalls how he found himself taking up arms against Chinese invaders. A temple dancer - or sacred prostitute, in effect - remembers how her father sold...
...being forced into a difficult balancing act between the need to prevent a double-dip recession and the desire to keep Japan's budget deficit from spinning out of control. The recession is knocking tax revenues so far below expectations that the deficit will rise to $548 billion this year, an enormous 10% of GDP. Yet, despite Hatoyama's instructions to keep next year's spending no higher than this year's initial budget of $970 billion, the country's ministries have submitted 2010 spending requests totaling $1.04 trillion. (See pictures of how Japan has changed in 20 years...
...pledges of fiscal austerity. Major spending cuts have been rendered unrealistic by the current economic climate. Falling real wages and low business investment mean Japan's recovery is fragile. A recent Nikkei newspaper survey showed that 38% of top Japanese executives rated the likelihood of another downturn next year as high or somewhat high. The biggest risk, cited by 69% of respondents, was "the effect of fiscal stimulus measures wearing off." Hatoyama appears to be willing to continue stimulus spending under the circumstances even if that means more red ink. He has learned a lesson from 1997, when Tokyo prolonged...
...effort to make this vital structural change, the DPJ has recognized a simple fact long denied by predecessors: consumer spending is weak because household income is so low relative to GDP. Real wages per worker have fallen every year but one since 2001. In response, the DPJ, in its policy manifesto used to win the election, came up with a series of programs that will not only put more money into the pockets of consumers but also ease the financial burdens of child-rearing. Programs would include a child allowance of $3,000 per year per child, free medical care...