Word: straitjackets
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George Bush told reporters last week that a "fiscal straitjacket" is good for government. Maybe he should ask Mike Easley how it feels. Easley became Governor of North Carolina in January, dreaming of smaller class sizes and a prescription-drug benefit for seniors. These weren't wild fantasies; his predecessor, fellow Democrat Jim Hunt, doled out plums for eight years while the economy boomed--a pre-kindergarten program for low-income kids, big pay raises for teachers, $1.5 billion in tax cuts...
...other hand, however enthused congressional Republicans say they are about their fiscal straitjacket - "the budget is tight, and that is exactly where we want it to be and where we need it to be," says House Budget Committee chairman Jim Nussle - congressmen are congressmen, and swallowing bitter political pills in the name of fiscal discipline has never been either party?s strong suit...
...causes of his country's woes. He has cut back on incentives for foreign investors and balked at forcing companies to repay their debts. Late last year, Taiwan's President Chen ordered banks to keep lines of credit open to delinquent debtors, a move that has put a straitjacket on liquidity and dampened investment. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad clings to a peg that has hugely overvalued the ringgit. "It's going to take Thailand and Malaysia 10 years," says Tim Condon, chief economist at ING Barings. "So far, most Asian economies aren't willing to let the market have...
Pere Enfantin's vest is close to that great therapeutic invention of the time, the straitjacket. You can't look without dread at the photos and engravings of panopticons, meeting houses, commune buildings, phalansteries and other social-idealist architecture in the 19th century stretch of this show. They resemble prisons and nunneries because they were prisons and nunneries, the difference being that the prisons meant to keep sinners in, whereas the Utopian buildings aimed to keep them out. But the same grim coerciveness suffused both, as we know from their ultimate state forms in the 20th century: Nazism and communism...
What Tina Turner knew 30 years ago, Kina Cosper has rediscovered today. Beyond the stylistic straitjacket of high-gloss R. and B. and its numbing cliches (the champagne, the cell phones, the velvet-rope nightlife) is a real world of captivating but not always pretty emotions. Kina spent the mid-'90s singing in the pop R.-and-B. group Brownstone. Here she discards that bland sound for a pungent mixture of rock and soul that gives her hard, clear voice a surprisingly potent charge. She builds her songs around spare assertions of womanly independence, slamming the people who stood...