Business: Consumers in a Squeeze

Still spending, but also cutting fun, frills and other nonessentials

Before I'll pay what they want me to I'll just live without it, 'Cause I'll never doubt, You can't ration nothing I ain't done without.

So go the lyrics of a new country-and-western ditty that has come out of Atlanta and was written by Georgia's Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller. Miller's lament may never make the Top Forty, but a great many of his countrymen surely share his gloom about having to "do without." As in past times of leaping prices and deepening economic slump, Americans...

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