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letters
Committees need
GPSF members
To the Editor:
The Graduate and Professional Student
Federation has the responsibility for
nominating graduate and professional
students for the Chancellor's committees.
Now is your chance to become a powerful
and influential B(MW)OC!
These committees still have openings:
Calendar, Space, Facilities Use, Student
Stores Advisory, Traffic Regulation
Appeals, Faculty, Building and Grounds,
Status of Minorities and Disadvantaged,
Scholarships, Awards, Student Aid and the
Student Health Service Adm. Board. These
last two tend to be very popular so please list
several alternates. If you would like to be on
one of these committees, please come by the
GPSF office in Suite D, Carolina Union for
an application. They're on the outside door.
1 need them by June at the latest.
Roy Rocklin
Vice-President, GPSF
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.gls ' - if 4 i Mi i I
I I 1 1 i I
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T r TP i 1
'WBER HOW WE USED To UJ6H YJHEH d! W
BKHINS HIS m INTO
Guidelines
Carter administration plays
down wage-price controls
WASHINGTON (AP) Faced with growing evidence
that the wage and price guidelines aren't working, the Carter
administration has begun to de-emphasize their importance.
It has little choice, since the only other option may soon be
to admit failure, and politicians and bureaucrats are loath to
admit they have failed at anything.
Alfred Kahn, the president's chief
inflation adviser, scarcely mentioned
the guidelines during a speech to the
National Association of Homebuilders
last week in which he gave a detailed
explanation of the administration's
efforts to control inflation.
He acknowledged that he had given
the guidelines "short-shrift" in his
remarks. But he said he didn't want to
exaggerate their importance because
they never were intended to play
anything but a minor role in the anti-inflation effort.
Kahn had said previously that if the guidelines didn't show
results by the beginning of summer, he would personally
Kahn
consider them to have failed.
Summer is less than a month away, and inflation hasn't
abated significantly yet. Indeed, President Carter said last
week he expects serious, adverse inflationfigures for the next
two to three months. Prices increased at an annual rate of
nearly 14 percent during the first four months of the year.
Kahn admitted last week, after the government reported
another 1. 1 percent increase in consumer prices in April, that
the government can't do much about the worse current
causes of inflation, rising" oil, housing and food prices.
Both Kahn and Treasury Secretary W. Michael
Blumenthal now say consumer prices will increase at least 8.5
percent this year, up from an original target of 7.4 percent,
and could easily be higher.
Kahn stressed the importance of other steps being taken to
restrain inflation, especially fiscal policies to slow
government spending and monetary policies to tighten the
money supply and raise interest rates. Blumenthal has
adopted a similar stance.
The administration will be reluctant to entirely drop the
guidelines anytime soon. Carter said in remarks last week
that they should be continued. And Chairman G. William
Miller of the Federal Reserve Board told Congress, also last
week, he believes the guidelines have helped hold wages and
prices below what they would have been without any
guidelines.
However, the tendency will be to give them a diminished
role so that less attention is paid to them.
The guidelines ask business to hold price increases one
half of one percentage point below the average increases
during the J 976-77 period.
However, they provide that prices may increase as much as
necessary to offset uncontrollable increases in costs, such as
for fuel and raw materials. This has allowed many businesses
to increase prices above the 1976-77 year average, but still be
considered in compliance with the program.
The major reason the guidelines haven't succeeded in
restraining overall inflation is that they don't apply to the two
areas where inflation has been most severe, food and fuel.
Furthermore, they were designed to work in a period when
growth of the economy was slowing and pressures on prices
were already easing because of reduced demand for foods
and services. However, the economy experienced an
unexpectedly rapid spurt of growth in the final quarter of
1978.
It "now appears that economic growth finally has slowed,
but it probably has occurred too late to help in significantly
reducing inflation for this year at least, although some
slowing of price increases later this year is likely.
1 9
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Thursday. May 31. 1979 ; The Summer Tar Heel 5