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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (4871)	5/13/2003 10:25:02 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5185

GROVER NORQUIST: 'Drowning the Government' Department Chief Mephisto, I think I understand why we have such intransigence to give a hand to the needy in high government circles..... He denies the allegation, but apparently Grover Norquist, described as the "field marshall" of the Bush Adminstration tax-cut, said this: "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." wildwilderness.org Here's the denial about using the "tub" metaphor, while fully vouching for the notion that destroying all the social programs of government is undoubtedly Norquist's goal: pbs.org Quote: BILL MOYERS: You're on record as saying, my goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub. Is that a true statement? GROVER NORQUIST: No. The first part is an accurate statement of exactly what we're trying to do. We've set as a conservative movement a goal of reducing the size and cost of government in half in 25 years, which is taking it from a third of the economy down to about 17 percent, taking 20 million government employees and looking to privatize and get other opportunities so that you don't have all of the jobs that are presently done by government done by government employees. We need a Federal government that does what the government needs to do, and stops doing what the government ought not to be doing.

To: Mephisto who wrote (4871)	6/5/2003 11:12:12 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

The Poor Held Hostage for Tax Cuts Editorial The New York Times June 5, 2003 Millions of low-income families were cruelly denied child credits in the administration's latest detaxation victory. Now, with consummate arrogance, Republican leaders in Congress are threatening another irresponsible tax-cut bidding war as the price for repairing the damage. "There are a lot of other things that are more important than that," said Tom DeLay, the House Republican majority leader, signaling that revisiting the child-care issue will open the door to even worse deficit-feeding tax-cut plans. Mr. DeLay at least offered unabashed candor instead of the crocodile tears of other Republicans. They are now embarrassed over the furor that low-income families were deleted in the final G.O.P. deal on the tax-cut boon weighted so shamelessly last month to favor the wealthiest Americans. There is a clear and sensible solution to restore the $400 child-credit increase to the working poor in a Senate proposal from Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, and Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine. Their measure, which would cost $3.5 billion and help nearly 12 million children, would be paid for by eliminating some of the tax-shelter abuses that fed the Enron scandal. Republicans are scrambling for political cover now, fearing the wrath of the mythic soccer-mom voting bloc next year. But the rival child-care solution being offered by Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the finance chairman, introduces a whole new scale of irresponsibility to the tax-cut games. This would expand the credit to 6.5 million low-income households, although not to minimum-wage earners of less than $10,500 a year. But at the same time, the upper-bracket limit would be generously, gratuitously raised another $40,000 to benefit families earning up to $189,000, hardly the neediest among us. Plus the credits would be made permanent instead of temporary, as currently enacted. This makes it a $100-billion-plus budget-busting measure lacking the cost offsets of the sane and prudent Lincoln-Snowe approach. The fiction of Republican leaders' promises to contain the deficit damage of their tax cuts is becoming clearer with each wad of debt rolled onto future generations. nytimes.com Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

To: Mephisto who wrote (4871)	8/7/2003 9:03:54 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5185

Despair of the Jobless The New York Times August 7, 2003 By BOB HERBERT The folks who put the voodoo back in economics keep telling us that prosperity is just around the corner. For the unemployed, that would mean more jobs. Are there more jobs just around the corner? This alleged economic upturn is not just a jobless recovery, it's a job loss recovery. The hemorrhaging of jobs in the aftermath of the recent "mild" recession is like nothing the U.S. has seen in more than half a century. Millions continue to look desperately for work, and millions more have given up in despair. The stories have been rolling in for some time about the stresses and misfortunes that are inevitably associated with long-term joblessness: the bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions, the dreams deferred, the mental difficulties - anxiety, depression - the excessive drinking and abuse of drugs, the family violence. There are few things more miserable than to need a job and be unable to find one. How bad is it? The Economic Policy Institute in Washington reported last week that "since the business cycle expansion began in November 2001, payrolls have contracted by 1 million (1.2 million in the private sector), making this the weakest recovery in terms of employment since the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] began tracking monthly data in 1939." John A. Challenger, who runs the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said it is taking an average of 20 weeks for job seekers to find employment, and many are unable to match their previous salary. "Employers have all the cards," he said. "Not only are they sharpening their salary pencils, but the screening of candidates is probably the toughest it has ever been." The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official rate refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the "discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12 months but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are the involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot find them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay significantly less than jobs they once held. When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits. That's an awful lot of lost purchasing power for a society that needs broad-based wage growth among its consumers to remain economically viable. Most Americans depend on their paychecks to get from one week to the next. If you cut off that paycheck, everything tends to go haywire. Right now there is no plan, no strategy for turning this employment crisis around. There is not even a sense of urgency. At the end of July the Bush administration sent its secretaries of commerce, labor and treasury on a bus tour of Wisconsin and Minnesota to tell workers that better days are coming. But they offered no real remedies, and the president himself went on a monthlong vacation. The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the fundamental interests of workaday Americans. On the business side of this divide, increased profits are realized by showing the door to as many workers as possible, and squeezing the remainder to the bursting point. Productivity (based primarily on improvements in technology) is way up. Hiring, of course, is down. Part-time and temporary workers are in; full-time workers with benefits are out. And then there's the ominous trend of sending higher-skilled jobs overseas to low-wage places like India and China, an upscale reprise of the sweatshop phenomenon that erased so many U.S. manufacturing jobs over the past quarter century. Working Americans need jobs just to survive. But the Bush administration equates the national interest with corporate interests, and in that equation workers can only lose. There are ways to spark the creation of good jobs on a large scale in the U.S. (I will explore some of them in a future column.) But that would require vision, a long-term financial investment and, most important, a commitment at the federal level to the idea that it is truly in the nation's interest to keep as many Americans as possible gainfully employed. nytimes.com Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company