Jimmy Carter's favorite authors are Dylan Thomas and James Agee, but this week the speed reader from Plains may be pondering the works of Rudyard Kipling ("If") and John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote, "Of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' " It might have been that if Carter had taken certain steps earlier, inflation would be lower, the economy would be stronger and the President would be more popular. Hindsight, of course, is one of the few cheap things in this inflationary age. But it has value as a guide to those who do not wish to be condemned to repeat the past. In short, Carter may learn from previous mistakes —his own and those of others.
Certainly Carter did not start the spiral. The blame for that is ingloriously bipartisan. The bulge began when Lyndon Johnson in 1966 failed to level with American people about the true costs of the Viet Nam War and refused to recommend an income tax increase. So the nation plunged deeply into deficit, and inflation roared from little more than 1% in the mid-'60s to 4.2% in 1968. Richard Nixon grossly worsened a bad situation by also using deficit spending and then clamping on controls; prices soared after they were lifted rising 6.2% in 1973 and 11% in 1974. Gerald Ford, inheriting an economic mess as well as a moral mess, pursued stringent fiscal policies that brought inflation down to 5.8% in 1976, but only after the nation had suffered through a severe recession.
Events abroad, also well beyond Carter's control, had conspired to aggravate inflation. OPEC'S quintupling of oil prices inspired the money-poor but materials-rich nations of the Southern Hemisphere to pump up prices for commodities as disparate as copper, tin, rubber, jute, cotton, bauxite, coffee, cocoa, tea, sugar. Instant communications—TV and transistor radios—spread the message of the good life. People in Timbuktu no less than in Toledo demanded more—more than society could reasonably produce. Communication, education and sophistication enabled the world in the 1970s to virtually defeat smallpox—and helped make just about every country fall victim to inflation.
When Carter took office, the polls already were showing that the public ranked inflation as domestic enemy No. 1. He might have seized a rare opportunity to stir and rally the people against it with his very first act: his inaugural speech on Jan. 20, 1977.
The country then was on an emotional high, ready for new politics, prepared to change, to dare, to follow where the new President might lead. Carter might have called for sacrifices by special interest groups for the benefit of all. He might have championed the repeal of narrow and highly inflationary laws —legislation that, to cite only two of many examples, mandates that the steepest union wages be paid on Government-aided construction jobs and requires that high-cost U.S. ships carry all cargo moving between domestic ports.
Most important, he might have called for a severe reduction in the growth of federal spending, because it is deficit spending that obliges the Federal Reserve to print the money that generates inflation.