Word: wages
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much of the "leadership" and "action" that the President rightly said they yearn for. Even within the Administration, some officials found it hard to muster more than faint praise for the end product of so much public and private soul searching. Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, who favored more wage-price jawboning and a bigger public service employment program than Ford proposed, said, "It is a well-balanced program. Whether it goes far enough as a whole or in individual directions is a complicated question that members of Congress may well answer differently. But I think it is a useful...
...WAGE-PRICE RESTRAINTS. No Other part of the package is as weak as this one. Speaking of his new Council on Wage and Price Stability, Ford said, "I emphasize, in fact re-eniphasize, that this is not a compulsory wage and price control agency." By seeking authority to impose wage and price controls on concentrated industries that have the power to administer prices, the President might have been able to damp inflation, though perhaps at undue political and bureaucratic cost...
...President promised only that the new council would "monitor wage and price increases in the private sector" and hold public hearings if necessary. Arthur Burns, disappointed that Congress has rejected stand-by authority for the President to put on effective controls, said, "Let's live with the present legislation for a few months and see how it works. But let's not live with it indefinitely if it doesn't work...
Based on his unusually candid critique of Ford's program, Burns will be one voice urging future flexibility, including perhaps some mandatory wage-price and energy controls and more federally funded jobs and tax aid for the unemployed and poor. If Ford's present proposals do not do the job, some of his other advisers, including William Seidman, his economic policy coordinator, will probably join Burns in that advice...
...WAGES, in the absence of controls, will continue spiraling. Workers everywhere will try to keep up with soaring food prices and the aftereffects of heightened fuel prices, which seem now to have peaked, yet continue to pull up other prices. Okun sees some of the biggest increases coming in nonunion sectors, as employers voluntarily pay more out of a sense of obligation to inflation-wounded workers and then pass the costs on to customers. In any event, says Pechman, some form of reasonable restraint is needed now in the form of direct and selective intervention by Government, or by next...