Economic Outlook

And what has happened to the dollar -as if you didn't know-is that it doesn't buy much any more. Or, to turn the situation around the other way, it now takes a great many more dollars to purchase what only a few of the pieces of green paper used to bring home.

Just how. many more dollars was emphasized with stark clarity by a recent Gallup Report. It seems that pollster George Gallup's organization has been asking U.S. consumers an interesting question for the past 51 years: What is the smallest amount of money a family of four (husband, wife, and two children) needs each week to get along in this community?

In 1937-when that question was first asked-the median answer was $30. By 1947, the figure had risen to $43. In 1957, it was $72. Ten years after that, $101. In 1977, the answer was $199 ... and this year it's $201.

Which, of course, explains why the folks you see over there in the ads accompanying this column seem so smug ... yet so ridiculous. Back in 1943-just 35 years ago, when those advertisements appeared in several of this country's leading magazines$150 a month was, indeed, a comfortable amount of money for two people to retire on. Today, those two retirees would need $750 to enjoy the same standard of living. And 10 or 20 or Lord save us-35 years from now? Don't even ask.

Well, of course, we've all been told that Stage II of Little Jimmy Carter's "fight" against inflation is going to change all that. (Just as Richard Nixon's Phase 1, Phase 11, Phase 111, etc. "fight" against inflation was going to change all that back in '74 and '75.)

Isn't it interesting, though, that all these politicians' "fights" against inflation always seem to concentrate so heavily on the belt tightening and sacrificing that we (never the politicians who create inflation in the first place with their printing-press money "giveaways") must do?

And isn't it interesting the way the progressive income tax has been set up so that the typical citizen (that's you and me) already gets mugged twice even before we're asked to sacrifice:

Once when the cost of everything we buy goes up. And the second time when, if we're lucky, we get a raise in pay that's big enough to keep us abreast of those rising costs. (Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, has stated that a 7% increase in personal income increases federal tax collections about 10.5% as everyone is pushed into more confiscatory tax brackets. So, even if your paycheck expands fast enough to match inflation, you still lose because the government takes ever-bigger bites from those ever-increasingly worthless dollars you bring home.)