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McGovern is admirably explicit: he has said repeatedly that his "domestic priority No. 1" is a job "for every man and woman capable of working" and has committed himself to pushing unemployment down to 4% by 1974. He would do so partly by means of his $ 10 billion program to immediately hire 1,000,000 people—many of them heads of welfare families—and partly by spending on a wide variety of programs to expand demand throughout the economy. McGovern says on the stump that "the Nixon inflation is ground into every pound of hamburger you buy." But former Budget Director Charles Schultze, a McGovern adviser, concedes that wage and price boosts might be higher under his candidate than under a re-elected Nixon. Schultze insists that the inflationary price must be paid, if necessary, to avoid the social disruption caused by prolonged unemployment.
CONTROLS. This is an issue that will face the next President immediately after Inauguration Day. He will have to decide quickly what changes, if any, to recommend in the present law, which expires April 30. Nixon is pledged to dismantle the controls—which he erected in violation of his own free-enterprise principles—as soon as he judges that inflation can be checked without them. He is almost sure to extend them for a while. Indeed, he might even tighten them, at least on labor, in line with the general conservative and anti-inflationary bent of a second Nixon Administration. Neil Jacoby, a Republican member of the Pay Board, has suggested that the guideline for wage increases might be lowered to "around 4%" from the present 5.5%. Nixon is under pressure from businessmen to relax the guideline on profit margins, but he has given no hint whether he will do so.
McGovern's spending proclivities would seem to make controls even more essential for him than for Nixon, but he long talked as if controls were a bit of Nixon trickery that he intended to abolish quickly. He has now come around to advocating a control plan of his own, but it is still a less formal one than the President's. McGovern would replace the Pay Board and Price Commission with a single review board that would be part of the White House. After consulting with industry, labor and consumer representatives, the board would draw up guidelines for pay and price increases. Compliance would be mostly voluntary, but McGovern as President would retain authority to order rollbacks of increases that "flagrantly" violated the standards.