Word: combatting
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Raising taxes to make it seem they're doing something about the deficit may be a wise (if cynical) political move, but it does little to combat the mess into which the budget process has descended. As the deficit-reduction package of 1982 showed, increases in revenue are rarely used to combat the deficit--they usually end up as a justification for more pork-barrel spending...
...than 150 million Americans live in areas which fall below federal clean air standards, and the American Lung Association estimates that more than 100,000 people in this country die each year from dry sulfate air poisoning alone. President Bush introduced a new clean air bill last year to combat this problem; during the campaign he spoke of individuals' "right" to breathe clean air. But now Bush is threatening to veto this very bill, the first of its kind since 1977, because Congressional Democrats had the nerve to attach real enforcement mechanisms to Bush's platitudes...
Hard times have struck the West as well. In Britain, where the government has kept interest rates high to combat a 10.6% inflation rate, at least 1,800 companies have gone bankrupt so far this year. That is more than double the rate of business failures over the same period a year ago. To take the edge off the pain, Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major last week reduced a key & interest rate by a full percentage point, to 14%. At the same time, Britain said it would join the European Monetary System, which coordinates exchange rates among key members...
...pact, which will make a surprise attack by either camp virtually impossible, limits NATO and the Warsaw Pact to a total of 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armored combat vehicles and 20,000 artillery pieces on each side in the area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. While the totals for each of the alliances are the same, the effect is immensely lopsided. To come down to those ceilings, NATO will have to destroy 2,900 tanks, for example, and no artillery. The Warsaw Pact, however, must scrap nearly 23,000 tanks and 26,900 artillery pieces...
...government could send communications and logistics experts, even minesweepers to the crisis zone. Last week, in an effort to blunt the criticism that Japan is wimping out, the Foreign Ministry dispatched a small team of volunteer medics to Saudi Arabia and promised more may follow. Others advocate dispatching combat units under United Nations authority. However, Japanese officials worry that even strictly non-offensive deployments would arouse anxiety among their neighbors in Asia...