Word: okun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wholesalers, packers and other middlemen. Farmers paid 7% more for the goods that they bought last year, but they also received a walloping 17% more for the products they sold. "There is no mystery whatsoever as to why retail food prices have risen in the past year," says Arthur Okun, another member of TIME's Board of Economists. "The answer lies almost entirely in the rise of wholesale farm prices. If there is any mystery, it is why retail prices have not risen more than they have...
...Government stockpile purchases have tended to keep commodity prices from falling. The reserves now comprise not only 15 strategic metals such as aluminum and tin but dozens of anything-but-strategic materials, including even 1,500 tons of feathers. Stockpiling policy in general "is a national joke," says Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and former adviser to Lyndon Johnson. "We worked like hell in the 1960s to get the stockpiles down. Most of the pressure against reducing them came from industry, anxious to restrict the supply of certain commodities...
...this fiscal year Social Security taxes will bring in about two-thirds as much as individual income taxes. In fact, workers have anted up for past increases with scarcely a murmur of protest, and there seems to be little reason to expect anything different now. Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists, expresses amazement at "the tolerance of the public for higher taxes, as long as they are called Social Security contributions...
Even Nixon's economic critics would support some paring of controls. Arthur Okun, for example, proposes exempting any products that are in short supply, such as lumber and steel scrap, because controls on such items only lead to secret sales at illegally high prices. Liberal economists also go along with the Administration's argument that farm-price controls would be unworkable, even though something must be done about food prices, which rose 15% at the farm level last year. The consensus among economists is that the U.S. must overhaul its farm policies by increasing acreage allotments, reducing price...
...Administration to change or chuck out the profit-margin test, which disallows price increases to firms that are making a bigger rate of return on their sales than during a base period. In the present economic upsurge, quite a few big companies are hitting their profit-margin ceiling. Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and a Democrat, agrees that the test "is counterproductive as far as efficiency is concerned." Overly profitable firms can always lower their earnings through heavy spending. Some economists, notably Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, would also like to trim the present...