Even some bills that appeared to target undeniably needy causes, like the beleaguered city of Camden, had expensive strings attached.
More restaurateurs are cutting ties with the online food-ordering service Seamless because of the high fees and other expensive strings that come with it.
And while the company's healthcare plan is more generous than many of its competitors, it does come with expensive strings attached.
People demand the finest doctors, state-of-the-art technology and expensive drugs, no strings attached.
All the hype — along with a string of expensive duds, a steep downturn in DVD sales and skewed economics — led to yet another expensive lesson for well-heeled Hollywood interlopers.
The young Fairbanks attended a string of expensive private schools, most of them Episcopal, many of them military, in Manhattan and the Los Angeles area, and he had private tutors for two years while living in Paris and London.
Most of his money was gladly spent on supporting his family in lavish fashion: he bought a house for his long-suffering mother, and paid for a string of expensive hospitals for his schizophrenic sister, Charlotte, who was ill-disposed to show gratitude.
In contrast, the string of expensive disasters in 2011, including the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, did not lead to a rise in market-wide premiums, despite costing the insurance industry $116 billion, much of it reinsured.
Some critics have questioned how the elder Mr. Bo, with his modest government salary, could afford tuition at a string of expensive private schools in both England and the United States; during a news conference days before he was relieved of his job, Mr. Bo insisted that his son's schooling was paid for through scholarships.
From a Tumblr to a Book to…: Wash That Blog Out With Soap At 24, Emma Koenig has amassed all the accouterments of her generation: an expensive college degree; a string of low-paying (and no-paying) jobs; and the lease on an overpriced, undersize apartment in the East Village stuffed with a rotating cast of Craigslist roommates, which she eventually gave up to move back in with her parents.
