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Fat Farmers. Inflation has also magnified the pain of recession, producing a squeeze tighter than anyone in the 70% of the U.S. population who is under 45 has experienced before. The downward drift in the economy over the past twelve months has been paralleled by the longest and steepest sustained slide in stock values since the bear market of 1969-70. Since January 1973, the Dow Jones average of 30 blue-chip industrial stocks has declined by 41%, while the broader-based New York Stock Exchange Composite Index has fallen even further, by 43%. Shares of companies in autos, airlines, chemicals, paper, packaged foods and other indus tries are trading at mid-1950s prices or lower. The plunge has savaged the for tunes of the 32 million Americans who own stock directly and the scores of mil lions of others who have a stake in the market through pension funds and prof it-sharing and retirement programs.
At the same time, the value of wages and salaries is being shrunk by inflation. Last year's average 8% inflation rate was tolerable because incomes in creased even more. But this year, for the first time since World War II, "disposable" income — what families have left over after they pay their taxes and other public fees — has actually fallen, if only by 1.5%. Workers in some unions that have won fat pay increases this year have managed to stay ahead of today's inflation. Yet the only broad sector of the economy that is clearly doing well nowadays is composed of the nation's 10 million farmers. Although the fact has been obscured by the well-publicized protests against low beef and poultry prices, grain farmers have been doing better than any single part of the U.S. economy outside of the oil industry. Farm profits are likely to come close to $27 billion this year; while that is a substantial drop from last year's $32 billion, it is still a fat 54% above the $17.5 billion the farmers got in 1972. Because profits are strong, farm real estate has been booming. Values rose 30% or more in the past year in a dozen states in the East, Midwest and Great Plains.
Although the recession's reach grows almost day by day, its effects have spread unevenly over the nation's social and economic landscape. Unemployment is heaviest in the industrial Northeast and the Far West; it is well below the national average in the South, in the Midwest farm belt and in the ore-and resort-rich Rocky Mountain states. Colorado's zero-growth advocates see no harm in the fact that recession has trimmed the number of new jobs in the state from 65,000 in 1973 to about 1,600 this year.