Budget conventions that treat such fees as reduced spending offer a way out of the budget impasse imposed by the tax pledge.
The Five Year Forward View – Simon Stevens' plan to make the NHS more sustainable – and Lord Carter's review of NHS spending, offer hope for a different approach.
Mr. Obama's speech, with its pledge to protect programs like Medicaid, and the Republican plan, drawn up by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, with its emphasis on deep cuts in taxes and spending, offer two starkly competing visions.
Councils have multi-year budgets, and local public accounts committees ensure spending offers value for money.
The first one, last autumn, which cut some $7 billion in spending, offered an unprecedented public spectacle of Parliament members grilling squirming bureaucrats, turning the tables on the powerful pooh-bahs who had long called the shots.
According to news reports (in Chinese) of the investigation, the local officials and their middlemen in Foshan, a city in Guangdong, pocketed 30% of the subsidies they handled.As graft targets go, China's R&D spending offers rich pickings.
Like many of his peers, Stephen Moore, director of fiscal studies at the Cato Institute, which has long condemned new federal spending, offered a rationale for the measures Bush has taken that he finds distasteful.
Just meeting the increased need for child care along with the administrative costs of enforcing the new work requirements would cost $8.3 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, more than 16 times the new spending offered in the bill.
"Not a single child, not a single student, not a single teacher, not a single nurse, not a single police officer, not a single senior led us into this recession," Mr. Reid said, assailing the vast number of cuts to federal spending offered by the House.
The announcement, which was attacked by members of Congress but praised by critics of Pentagon spending, offered the first indication that Mr. Rumsfeld was prepared to cut cold war programs sharply to pay for modernizing the forces, as President Bush vowed in last year's campaign.
Election commission data on electioneering spending may offer a glimpse of the future, though.
