Word: budgeting
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Altogether Brown calculates that his Plan B would cost the world an additional $190 billion a year. That might seem high, until he compares the price tag to the global military budget, which stands at more than $1.2 trillion. All we have to do is find the political and popular will to implement the plan. But that's the problem. Brown's proposals are solid, but the real battle over climate change is now political, not technological, and it's one that too many environmentalists tend to discount. If you've drunk the green Kool-Aid, it can seem frustratingly...
...debate almost always comes down to the question of whether to fix it or end it. But these alternatives largely miss the reality. Every attempt to fix the death penalty bogs down in the same ambivalence. We add safeguards one day, then shortcut them the next. One government budget contains millions of dollars for prosecutions, while another department spends more millions to defend against them. Indeed, the very essence of ambiguity is our vain search for a bloodless, odorless, motionless, painless, foolproof mode of killing healthy people. No amount of patching changes the nature of a Rube Goldberg machine...
What's funny is that Hollywood has never been less interested in making the big serious movie: the star-laden, noble-themed, grownup film, of medium budget or higher, that the Oscars used to shower with statuettes. The big studios leave financing of prestige product to their "indie" subsidiaries; hence the proliferation of family dramas that can be made on the cheap, and the near extinction of the Out of Africas. The films Hollywood gives awards to in January and February are precisely the kind it avoids making for most of the year. The Oscars are largely an affirmative-action...
...with many other media organizations--and like The Wire's budget-strapped cops--they're paying attention mainly to the bottom line. Out-of-town owners are demanding higher profits, bureaus are closing, layoffs are draining the institutional memory, and the staff barely has the resources to chase fires, much less do investigative work. One top editor repeatedly asks his troops, in impeccable corporatese, to "do more with less...
Something will have to give. Big changes in Social Security itself seem out of the question, so federal taxes other than payroll taxes will have to go up, government spending outside of Social Security will have to be cut, or budget deficits will grow. Or, most likely, a combination of all three. And it will begin to hit during the first term of whoever gets elected President in November. Not that you'll hear much talk about that on the campaign trail...