WINning?

This American artifact may ring a bell for those who lived through the 1970s.  

For those whom 1974 is as distant as World War II or the reign of Ramesses II, here is the story, from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan: 

President Gerald R. Ford inherited a nation in dire economic straits. A debilitating recession that combined high unemployment and a stagnant economy with rampant inflation posed many difficult challenges. With a degree in economics and 25 years of Congressional budgeting experience, President Ford plunged headfirst into the crisis. His first and most public move was to combat inflation. He declared inflation “public enemy number one.” Ford’s economic advisors devised a Whip Inflation Now or WIN program in the fall of 1974. It focused on a variety of voluntary anti-inflationary initiatives that individual citizens and businesses could embrace. Early enthusiasm for the program generated massive quantities of handmade and mass-produced material, including buttons, signs, clothing, stickers, ephemera, and much more. Unfortunately, enthusiasm waned by the New Year as the program failed to generate the results people had hoped for and the program quickly died out.

Inflation was and often is pretty damn serious. At the time it was a disaster for people on a fixed income, like many who had been paying into the Social Security fund for thirty years. The dollars that they received were worth far less than the dollars they had paid in; a dollar in autumn 1935, when Social Security was implemented, was equivalent to $3.65 in autumn 1974, but the recipient got that same dollar back -- which had depreciated by 83 cents, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation Calculator. News stories of little old ladies surviving on cat food led to the general cheerfulness of the era. 

And the little old ladies were just the tip of the dwindling iceberg. Inflation was eating invested money faster than it could be returned, which was discouraging all sorts of investments. As Amy Farber of the Federal Reserve Bank writes: 

In October 1974, with consumer inflation running at more than 10 percent annually, President Gerald Ford gave a now famous speech (watch video or read text) in which he proclaimed: “There is only one point on which all advisers have agreed: We must whip inflation right now.”

    “Whip Inflation Now” was not just a speech—it was a public relations campaign to enlist American citizens to hold back the increases in wages and prices of the 1970s, supposedly by increasing personal savings and taming spending habits. The symbol of the campaign was the large round red button with bold, white uppercase letters: W I N.

    According to the American Presidents blog, “The campaign did not work as President Ford had hoped. Inflation remained a threat to the economy well into the Reagan presidency … the pins were widely mocked and it gave Ford’s opponents an easy target for criticism.” 

Was the WIN campaign a failure? Economists may argue the point, but I think by every conceivable measure there's no question that it was. Inflation got worse into the late 1970s, and Ford's successor (just like his two predecessors) were incapable of formulating a policy that went beyond Ivory Tower economics and rather encouraged economic growth. This appears to be at least to be part of the massive, crushing failure of academia to teach the truth from at least the start of the postwar era to the present day. They were and are in love with socialism, and every policymaker who falls for that inflicts misery on his constituents.

I believe most of the disastrous ideas of public and social policy have come out of Western universities. I'm far from alone in that belief. Maybe WIN would have looked better in retrospect if a non-nuclear nation had declared war on us, just as FDR's New Deal looks like an economic powerhouse because war was breaking out and someone had to make all those tanks and planes.

For Ford, personally, the WIN campaign was a disaster. People may note that WIN was mocked, and Ford made fun of by Chevy Chase (a one-time show business personality), but most Americans thought Ford was a decent man. There was a lot of talk (in my family, for one) that if Ford had not pardoned Nixon he might have been elected in 1976, but I have my doubts. I think Ford was right on that one, that most Americans didn't want a Nixon clown show trial sucking all the oxygen out of the room. 

I think if Ford had not studied economics, and had a better plan than a vague FDR-ish call for normal people to go out and whip inflation (how does one do that? No one who was an adult at the time has ever been able to explain what they were supposed to do), the economy might have improved. He still would have had an uphill fight in 1976, with the swine flu disaster and the general hatred and fear of Washington everywhere, but an improving economy might have saved him from the juggernaut that was James Earl Carter. Despite everything, Ford carried 27 states in the election, but lost by about 1.7 million votes and got clobbered in the Electoral College.

I mention all this today not just because it's an excuse to talk about what was briefly a major cultural item -- WIN buttons -- but also to show that good intentions and college degrees don't always make for good results, especially in government. Reagan was an economic wonder in spite of rather than because of his economics degree from Eureka College; he spent decades learning about economics in the real world as his acting career dwindled. And Trump's bachelor's is also in economics, but I'm not sure he ever paid much attention in school. He probably learned more about economics at his father's knee. 

In the end, you can call for the people to rise up and whip that inflation, beat that poverty, conquer that cancer, declare war on bad weather, stop the tide from going out, but some battles can't be won by good intentions.