A long, hot summer
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Congress has left town on holiday, leaving one last Jimmy joke, which holds that the President isn't a case of the emperor having no clothes, but of there being no emperor. As the legislators hied their tiresome presences off on unneccessary, all-expense-paid inspection tours of the world's finer resort areas, they left behind a swamp of uncomPleted work. Whether or not the Senate will pass SALT, for example, is still not clear. Influential figures like Georgia's Senator, Sam Nunn, are making their vote conditional on extremely large increases in weapons procurement. Mr Nunn is widely regarded as one of the most rational and knowledgeable members of the Senate's Armed Services Committee, simply because he never raises his voice when demanding breathtakingly high expenditures for guns. As yet, the Adrninistration hasn't acceded to all of Nunn's demands; the Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, has only agreed to about 60 Per cent of what he wants by way of cannons and is not likely to agree with him on the r esurnption of conscription at least not tintil after the elections. All the same, SALT threatens to become the occasion of a massive arms build-up that the ten or Waive other liberals in the Senate are saying that they may join George McGovern in v..oting against ratification. Even conservatives like New York's Daniel Moynihan Seem to be disconcerted by the way 'the :vALT process' has caused a 'reckless and en demonic build-up of nuclear weaPons.' But interest in SALT has been crowded tit by continuing concern over oil and einconolnies. Congress left town withOut acting on President Carter's major proposals, or havingbrought forth any new ones of its OW, ne .s n. O Carter energy measure, however, already causing much discomfort and In_ any second thoughts. This is the decree nulling that air-conditioners be set no lower than 78-degrees Fahrenheit in all public or private places of business. Visitors to the White House report that the President seems able to sit cheerily through oppressively hot dinners with his coat on, but the town's lesser politicians are grumbling. When they make those speeches about sacrifice, they do not have themselves in mind. Whether it is this discovery that life without air-conditioning is no fun in the American summer, or a check on ill-considered enthusiasms, legislators and others are beginning to have doubts about an energy programme based mostly on an 80 billion dollar effort to manufacture synthetic fuels in commercial quantities. The cautious, the thoughtful, and the knowledgeable keep insisting that the most practical, the cheapest and the surest approach is long-term conservation, involving such things as changing architectural design, population density and land use patterns.
But, instead, attention and debate are given to fribbles and foolishness. The liberals are demanding that large sums be spent on passenger trains while the conservatives are insisting that oceans of oil will be found if only price controls are removed. Price controls on new oil were removed several years ago, in fact, but the largest drilling programme in the country's history has come up with less and less of it. The reserves which the oil companies had hoped would be discovered off the Atlantic coast have yielded nothing but a few belches of natural gas. The United States is currently producing in the vicinity of 1N million barrels of oil daily, production greater than Saudi Arabia and second only to the Soviet Union, and those gigantic quantities may be all the oil there is.
The consumer price index, the most frequently cited measure of inflation, continues to run at an annual rate of 13 per cent. Since government notes, available only in large denominations, are yielding nine per cent, if the prudent saver acts prudently by putting his money in a prudent instrument, he will not only not make any interest on it, but will see his principle washed away.
And so there has recently been a great rush to buy anything people think will hold its value.The price of residential real estate has risen much faster than inflation, as have any number of 'collectibles' for people who can't afford, or don't care, to speculate on houSes and land. Dolls, antique furniture, lithographs, stamps, old advertising posters, the most frightful second-hand junk is being lapped up by a generation of people who have learned that money in the bank is as durable as ice in the sun. At the same time, a working population whose wages do not keep up with inflation has been buying as little as possible in the way of ordinary goods. All major retail chains have been reporting poor to slumping sales.
To help steer the Administration around these rooks and shoals, Mr Carter has appointed Paul Volker to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. His selection was greeted with an enthusiasm which seemed forced. Volker has been around the Treasury Department, and government banking, for a long time. His record shows that he has sometimes been right — and sometimes wrong, like the rest of us. But, while he emits the standard 'hard-money' grunts expected from occupants of his office, the other things he says sound not wholly dissimilar to the gurgles and gasps of the previous Federal Reserve Chairmen, who have slithered through a succession of inflationary recessions.
Students of public administration, however, believe they have stumbled on the reason for at least some of the Government's bureaucratic lethargy. Narcotics police recently raided the Department of Labour and found that several offices of secretaries and file clerks were smoking marijuana, and sniffing a certain mysterious white powder, on the job.
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