Word: national
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...frustrated nation, but not all the blame for that condition attaches to the war in Viet Nam, racial bitterness, campus violence and crime in the streets. Government, business and consumers are deeply troubled by another major source of national tension: the rising pace of inflation. Though the U.S. standard of living is still the highest ever achieved, the value of the nation's currency is dwindling alarmingly. It has gone down by almost two-thirds in the past 30 years. A 1958 dollar is worth only 790 today, which means that a man must earn 26% more after taxes...
Last week the battle against inflation entered a new and crucial phase. The phase began when the nation's commercial banks raised their minimum interest charge for loans from 71% to an unprecedented 81% - a move that was widely interpreted as a portent of a serious credit crisis. The next day, the Government's top economic policymakers managed to sound downright alarmist as they made a rare joint appearance at a Washington press conference to plead for an extension of the 10% surtax on personal and corporate incomes. That tax, which is due to expire June...
Inflation is to the economy what pollution is to the environment-a corrosive force that unbalances everything. Though 16% of the nation's plant capacity stands idle, businessmen have been expanding their factories at a record rate, buying machines and materials now to beat further price rises and economize on scarce and costly labor. Export prices have risen more during the past year in the U.S. than in any other major country but Canada and Britain, and the nation's traditional trade surplus has all but disappeared. Wage gains are exceeding the increase in workers' productivity, pushing...
McCracken says that "we may be see ing the early signs of the cooling of inflationary pressures" - and many other experts agree with him. The nation's out put of goods and services is expanding; only half as fast as a year ago, and that growth may stop entirely during the summer. The volume of retail sales has been sluggish for a year, and un employment, still a low 3.5%, is up slightly from 3.3% earlier this year. Of the three principal forces in the economy, two have lost most of their lift. Government spending and consumer spending...
...coming decade, an inflation-weary nation should aim at a so-far elusive goal: stable prices, low unemployment and steady economic growth. The U.S. has already achieved a full-employment society, but the next job will be to devise ways to live comfortably with it. That will not be easy. The material prosperity of the 1960s has not produced tranquillity or happiness for large sections of the nation. A full-employment economy is a delicate mechanism, the clash of powerful forces, notably labor and management. Both forces will have to accept new atti tudes, new compromises and, above...