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...voters' perception was quite accurate: most of them really are worse off financially. Government figures released while the polls were still open last week showed that the Consumer Price Index leaped up at an annual rate of 18% in February, every bit as bad as the January figure that so rattled the nation. Worse, prices rose so much faster than wages that the purchasing power of a typical U.S. urban worker's after-tax pay dropped 1.4% in February alone. Major banks raised their prime interest rate on business loans yet again...
Thursday's market upheavals aside, investors, worried that inflation is jeopardizing all values, have bid down stock prices at a strenuous pace for the past two months. Despite a late rally that carried the average up 55 points from its Thursday low to its Friday high, the Dow index still lost 7 points for the week as a whole, closing at 778. That was down 14% from the Feb. 13 high of 904, one of the fastest drops in stock market history. The Dow average, composed of 30 blue-chip issues, understates the case; prices of less seasoned shares...
...long-range plan to bring the growth of federal spending under control. That can hardly be done without some trimming of the entitlement programs, which not only swallow 77% of the whole budget but are inexorably rising. That is because most of them are tied to the consumer price index. Social Security benefits, for example, will rise 13% this year because the CPI rose 13% in 1979. That creates a vicious circle: inflation increases federal spending, which increases deficits, which increases inflation. Several experts have proposed limiting the tie between prices and benefits to 85% of any rise...
...inflation. The wage-price guidelines have been very ineffective, and there is little reason to think their impact will increase. And the Administration's fee on imported oil will immediately force up further the item that is already rising faster than anything else in the consumer price index. Gasoline prices went up 60% between early 1979 and early 1980 (see chart...
...productive life. Such was the meaning of the Social Security and retirement policies that began to roll forth in 1933. The message: 65 and out. While mandatory retirement has recently been relaxed, with the age advanced to 70, popular thinking still falsely tends to take age as a sure index of vitality. The stereotype of an old person as a doddering, drooling, irrelevant nuisance is much circulated. Beyond some uncertain year, people are often regarded as having little or no need for earthly pleasures, particularly sexual ones. Says Myrna Lewis, co-author of Sex After Sixty: "Children carry a double...