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Beyond Wall Street, the combination of slump and inflation is causing genuine pain in specific regions and industries. In the Seattle area, where layoffs in the aerospace and lumber industries are severe, unemployment has reached an alarming 8.1%. Long lines form at food-stamp headquarters, and growing numbers of the idled men are sending their wives to work. Says a laid-off Boeing engineer whose wife has taken a job as a physical therapist: "I feel a bit mean kicking her out of bed in the morning, but her working means we can stay on here, hoping for a change."
The economic troubles are exacerbating social problems. In several cities, businessmen are pledging few if any summer jobs to organizers of work programs for disadvantaged black and Puerto Rican youngsters. That will hardly help cool the nation's ghettos this year.
In Akron, School Superintendent Conrad Ott worries about how he can persuade the voters to accept a tax increase that he feels will be forced by inflation. "We honestly cannot tell them we can give them more education for their dollars," he says. "We will be hard-pressed to provide the same education that the children are getting now." He lists these price increases since 1962: a seventh-grade science textbook has gone up from $2.91 to $4.59; an algebra book from $3.30 to $4.41; a movie projector from $369 to $519.
No Reassurance
The beginnings of class tensions between blue-collar and white-collar workers are also visible. In Akron, where rubber workers have taken to the picket lines, one striker grumbles: "School officials say they got to raise pay to hold teachers, but how can we get the kind of new income to meet rising taxes and prices? Nobody is better off these days than teachers." White-collar workers voice equal anger against the unionized men on production lines. "In a way, unions are responsible for what is happening to my pay," says one office worker in a rubber company. "They have pushed labor costs so high with demands for more dough for hourly workers that there isn't anything left for guys like me on salary. We have already been told by our management not to expect the kind of increases the guys making tires are going to get."
Throughout the nation, many people have an uneasy feeling that the economy is in unprecedented trouble and that Washington does not know what to do about it. Few are cheered by Administration assurances that falling profits and rising unemployment are good news because they indicate that inflation is being brought under control. Says Alfred Seaman, president of the advertising firm of Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles: "It is just as though I went to my board of directors and said, The cost of money is way up, we are giving everybody a raise and our billings are way offâbut don't worry.' How much confidence do you think they would have in me?"
The central problem is that inflation has proved far more stubborn than Burns and other originators of the game plan expected. A mere slump in the economy has not been enough to stop or even ameliorate it. Why not? Burns' reasoning is that the "demand-pull inflation" of earlier years