Word: basketfuls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Episcopal minister of Springfield, Ill. and later a bishop, encouraged Tommy to go to church once weekly, to join the Boy Scouts. Tommy's earliest interest was catching snakes at his family's summer cottage at Lake Paw Paw, Mich, and taking them home in a peach basket. ("We always wondered what happened to that snake that got away in the Pullman," says his sister.) His second interest was foreign nations. His third interest was organizing the neighborhood kids for military drill, in which he was always the commanding officer...
...onetime President Sir Alfred Munnings: "Why not use child murderers, who just get life sentences and have a jolly good time in prison?"* Novelist Denise Robins rushed into print with a touching elegy: "Little dog lost to the rest of the world," it began. "Up in your satellite basket curled . . ." The distressed schoolchildren of Doncaster offered their special prayers...
...first place, the index is not supposed to be a true measure of the cost of living. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics points out, it is only a measure of what families in the under-$10,000-a-year bracket, living chiefly in cities, pay for the "market basket" of 300 goods and services that such representative families presumably buy. The index shows the price increase since 1947-49, the base year, but no economist regards it as reliable except for the short...
Even on the narrow issue of measuring prices, the index is vulnerable. Food costs make up 30.1% of the market basket, but BLS does not check food stores on weekends, when most stores run their big sales and do most of their selling. BLS prices appliances in department stores, but not in discount houses, contends that discount prices are not really savings because they do not include delivery or service, although many discount houses now provide both. It asks auto dealers for an estimated selling price, does not check the deals that hard-bargaining buyers actually...
Despite the index's flaws, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets little support from Congress in trying to improve it. Only this year BLS tried to resume spot checks in several cities on actual consumer expenditures to see how representative its market basket is. But Congress refused to appropriate the trifling $115,000 needed. Doing his best with the tools Congress allows him, Commissioner Clague is considering asking Congress for funds to revise the index completely. Many economists believe that such an expenditure would be justified, so that BLS can find out exactly how U.S. families spend their money...