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Faster than Ever. It remains to be seen whether the Administration can make political capital out of the record expansion. Americans may be making more money than ever, but a recent Gallup poll showed that 60% of them still regarded finances as their most urgent problem; thanks in part to medicare, illness was second, noted by only 8%. A Christian Science Monitor survey of the Governors said that they "see the housewife's economic anxieties (and her husband's, too) as overshadowing either Viet Nam or crime in the cities as the issue most likely to be felt at the polls." The game is still keeping up with the neighbors, but the neighbors seem to be running faster than ever.
Inflation could rob Johnson of the potentially powerful pocketbook issue. G.O.P. orators are already putting emphasis on the phrase "profitless prosperity." Though the President may be tempted to campaign on the theme of "You never had it so good," it is doubtful that U.S. voters will give him all the credit. "They think that they had something to do with it, too," says a Democratic strategist. Johnson contends that his proposed 10% surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes would help avert inflation, but he is having little luck in persuading Congress. Unless the surcharge is enacted, he warns, in a particularly infelicitous phrase that he has been using frequently, most Americans will wind up paying an "inaction inflation tax." Example: a family with a $10,000 income would pay an additional $110 or so in taxes with the Johnson surcharge, but it would pay $285 more next year if the surcharge is not enacted and prices continue to rise at their present rate.
No Poor-Mouthing. The darkest side of the boom is the persistence of poverty. Thirty million Americans still live on poverty-level incomes ($3,000 a year or less for a family). The aged, the nonwhite and the small farm worker are particularly hard hit. In some Negro ghettos, 28% are unemployed—a higher rate than the U.S. as a whole experienced in the depths of the Depression. In addition, problems of air and water pollution, classroom shortages, inadequate mass transportation and urban decay plague the nation.
The resources are available to cope with the problems—Viet Nam notwithstanding. "This country is doing extremely well financially," said Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John
Gardner last week. "To poor-mouth, to say that we can't afford to make our cities livable, is just shocking to me."
Indeed, the nation has taken huge strides forward since the '30s. Franklin Roosevelt's "one-third of a nation" is now closer to one-seventh of a nation; many who are considered "ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished" by today's standards would not have been considered too badly off a generation ago. According to a Government report released by the President last week, the number of Negro families earning less than $3,000 has been halved, to 32%, in the past two decades, and fully 45% earn over $5,000 a year.