3. Tax-cut prospects look bad because the House's Bill Thomas won't go in the room with big-spender Bobby Byrd, to the point where the Democrat Max Baucus is begging Bush to lean on Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, for help.
The New York Times reported, however, that the tax cut's prospects in the Senate were always the primary White House concern.
President Bill Clinton seemed to cut off prospects of a major tax cut by declaring that the surpluses should go toward saving Social Security first -- leaving very little room for anything else.
As for the major legislation under discussion right now, the GOP tax cut, its prospects look better.
But whatever happens for the tax cut, the prospects for passing similarly sweeping legislation afterward, once Jones is in the Senate, are slim ― at least unless Republicans decide to abandon their strategy of passing legislation with party-line votes and try actual bipartisanship. .
There is a potential downside: Families that remain in neighborhoods where rents are comparatively low would find their vouchers cut, a prospect that has produced objections from some elected officials, including in New York.
Congress then gets an up-or-down vote on the group's recommendation, and if the answer is no, or the committee fails to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in cuts, there will be an automatic, equal cut, a prospect abhorred by both parties.
Forget money, even forget emissions cuts: the prospects for agreement in Durban on the Convention's one legal instrument, the future of the Kyoto Protocol, look bleak, according to one of the main powerbrokers who will be there, the US chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing.
The House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, and other Republicans have suggested that additional aid money must first be offset by equal spending cuts, a prospect that Mr. Obama rejected.
Luckily, there is Scoutspeak, a language designed to baffle laymen with submolecular analysis of every high-cut, sudden prospect who can high-point, bucket step and take proper angles but gets upright, runs with poor lean, and fails to syncopate his duodenum while percolating the jabberwocky.
Taken together with asymmetric Tory plans to hand local electorates a veto on tax rises but not service cuts, the prospect of line-by-line scrutiny of state expenditure is not an entirely comfortable one for advocates of the public realm.
