Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...week of February. By declaring the Postal Service's deficit "off budget," the number crunchers "saved" $1.7 billion. A similar bit of wizardry -- prepaying a $3 billion Pentagon payroll in the 1989 fiscal year -- "reduced" the 1990 deficit by that amount. Bush was in no position to resist the sleight of hand: the legerdemain was originally concocted by his budget director, Richard Darman...
While the bailout has bold ambitions, its financing is based on a dismaying kind of budgetary sleight of hand that hides the real cost from taxpayers. Of the $50 billion that the Government will spend on the bailout in this fiscal year, $30 billion will be borrowed through bond sales and will be considered "off budget." It will not be counted as Government spending and will not exacerbate this year's federal deficit. The remaining $20 billion will be in the budget, but slipped in through a loophole in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, so that the spending will...
...counted as part of the federal deficit. But by carrying that designation, they would have paid a higher interest rate than Government bonds. That extra interest expense would increase the overall cost of the bailout plan by an estimated $5 billion. The House refused to go along with that sleight of hand and voted to include the $50 billion in the federal budget. But the House exempted the S & L spending from deficit limits set by the Gramm-Rudman-Holling s law. Bush hopes to keep the financing off-budget when the House and Senate bills are reconciled...
...ticklish task is made even tougher by the failure of the Bush Administration and Congress to rein in a runaway budget deficit that helps keep interest rates high. White House and congressional leaders merely ducked the issue last month in a sleight-of-hand agreement that cut the 1990 deficit to about $100 billion to comply with the Gramm-Rudman law. But a recession could make a mockery of that rosy projection by swelling the red ink to as much as $175 billion. "Using monetary policy to slow the economy is a poor second-best solution," says David Rolley...
Billy Bathgate's metaphor for his own life is juggling: "It was juggling that had got me where I was...And when I wasn't juggling I was doing sleight of hand...magic was not the point, it was never the point, dexterity was to me the point...