Leadership in both parties would like to get past this, and thus the outcome may once again depend on Speaker Boehner passing a debt ceiling increase by violating the Hastert rule (i.e., without a majority of the majority) -- that's the only way these and other sudden-death budget bills have passed in recent years (see figure below).
PHOENIX — Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.
In 1945 Long was given leading roles in a musical, Pan-Americana, and a Western, Wanderer of the Wasteland, then starred with John Loder in A Game of Death, a budget remake of the classic thriller The Most Dangerous Game.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California was on the mark when he said this week that the state needed to change policies that spend more money on prisons than on the state's once-vaunted higher education systems, which are being bled to death in budget cuts.
Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.... Just before the Oct. 1 deadline, Mark Price, a father of six who was fighting leukemia, learned he needed a bone marrow transplant.
In his July 15 column, "Death and Budgets," David Brooks assures us that "we are never coercively going to give up on the old and ailing," but then argues that "it is hard to see us reducing health care inflation seriously unless people and their families are willing to... confront death and their obligations to the living".
Mr. Corning's death left a budget that had long been out of balance and a city government and political system that was under pressure to modernize by curbing patronage and closing the deficit.
A few years ago he wrote an essay predicting the death of big-budget movies: "The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist: just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions".
But he also has a death-spiral Illinois budget on his hands.
As a result of the surge in deaths and the budget issues that has caused, Case has had to think hard about the way her office spends money.
It escaped death -- but its budget was slashed from $400 million to $278 million in 1996.
