Budget Deficits: Rhetoric and Reality

From rhetoric to reality.

Mary Robinson was elected the first female President of Ireland in 1990, a position she held until she resigned in 1997 to take up the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. The daughter of two physicians, she holds a Master of Arts from Trinity College Dublin, a law degree from King’s Inns, Dublin, and a Master of Law from Harvard Law School. In 1...

Web Specifications: Rhetoric vs Reality

There is an increasing awareness within both the research literature and commercial practice that Web systems have a number of unique characteristics. Many organisations are responding to this by identifying modified processes that purport to address these unique characteristics. There is, however, the potential to utilise these processes as a marketing tool (indicating organisational capabilit...

Competition and quality: rhetoric and reality.

Despite the obvious differences between the USA and UK health care systems, they share the characteristics of being motivated and managed in relation to cost and process rather than quality (the improved health status of patients). Whilst governments and insurers across the world use the rhetoric of quality, they, as epitomized by the behaviours of UK and USA decision makers, fail to define, me...

Optimal Budget Deficits

Do Budget Deficits Cause Inflation ?

In 2004, the federal budget deficit stood at $412 billion and reached 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Though not at a record level, the deficit as a fraction of GDP is now the largest since the early 1980s. Moreover, the recent swing from surplus to deficit is the largest since the end of World War II (Figure 1). The flip side of deficit spending is that the amount of government de...