Inflation at 14.4 per cent

When Americans read the papers and tot up the number of rulers who are being invade or toppled, and the number of elected rulers who are being threatened with impeachment or votes of confidence, Americans must think they have, in Jimmy Carter, the most stable of elected monarchs.

No matter what he does, short of high crimes and misdemeanours, he's there until January of 1981 and this week Jimmy Carter had his finest hour. I should think he asked God every night to bless and keep President Sadat for, every time we saw him on television, Mr Sadat gave glory to Jimmy Carter in the highest. Caught at the airport before he left Cairo, he was asked by a journalist if he'd have been equally happy to sign the peace treaty in Jerusalem or Cairo, or did he feel that he had to do it in Washington? And he said at once, 'You're putting words in my mouth! I am going to Washington because you must understand this is Jimmy's show. Nobody but Jimmy's. He did it, he is a great man.' How Jimmy would like to hear that from the voters of the United States. 

Mind you, he's had more general applause for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement than for anything he's done. I call it an 'agreement' because it's an agreement to make a peace treaty. Nowhere in the texts do they call it a peace treaty. Seventy-five per cent of the American people strongly approve of his bringing to an end the interminable 30-years war between Israel and Egypt. But once the banquet was over and the bands stopped playing, he no longer had the excuse, which was a true excuse, to say that he'd been totally preoccupied with the Middle East at the expense of pressing matters at home. 

Last week, the Labor Department dropped a bombshell by announcing the biggest jump in consumer prices since mid-summer of 1974. What it meant was that last month inflation was running at an annual rate of 14.4 per cent which is almost double what the administration had promised, or expected, and the president's chief inflation fighter, the chairman of the so-called Council on Wage and Price Stability, had to appear at a hurriedly called press conference and, apart from begging us to believe in what he called 'the amazing strength of the economy' the best he could do was to flash a nervous grin and say the president had been so busy with Mr Sadat and Mr Begin that he'd not had time 'visibly' to show his concern for inflation, though we were told he's been at it 'invisibly'. 

Well, now he'd better be very visible on two problems: inflation and conserving energy. Only 29 per cent of Americans think Mr Carter is doing a good job in the presidency and where they scream for action is on those two issues. The Iranian Revolution, in spite of its shortness, has produced serious shortages and a quick rise in the price of oil. To stimulate domestic production, the president was urged to remove controls on the price of domestic oil but also to set up controls on the consumption of all oil. In other words, whatever he did, it seemed inevitable that Americans were going to be made to use less fuel and pay more for it at a time when they are bellowing that they pay too much for everything. 

And, just when people are finding that the costs of even modest housing are going sky high, the president is under great pressure to increase interest rates, which means it will be harder to borrow money from the banks and mortgage rates will go up. I ought to say, by the way, that the president himself cannot order an increase or a decrease in interest rates, that's outside his authority. That's the job of the Federal Reserve System, a government agency outside politics, which often won't do what the president wants it to do, but he can go on his knees and beg. And with inflation running at nearly double what the administration had confidently guessed, somebody has to stem the flow of money. 

Now the trouble with these obvious moves is that what President Carter does to try and conserve energy would also encourage more inflation. Raise the price of fuel and obviously you are going to raise the price of all the goods, from groceries to building materials, that are delivered by trucks, which means about 70 per cent of the country's supplies. 

At this point, Mr Carter must wring his hands and take to his praying mat, for this weekend is the deadline for a strike of – who do you think? – not simply the most powerful union in America but the one whose refusal to work could, more than that of any other union, bring the economy to a halt. I'm talking about the Teamsters, the truckers' national union. Since the war, they have replaced and outpaced the railroads as the transportation network of America. 

Now, whether by the time you hear this they have struck or settled for a new contract, there's no doubt that any settlement will go way beyond the guidelines, the wage limits, that this government, like other governments, piously hopes everyone will abide by. A fat, new wage package for the Teamsters would add to the cost of everything that is carried by road from one place to another. Even the Secretary of Energy, Mr Schlesinger, said the other day with a sigh, and not at all by way of criticism, 'The president is trying to reconcile irreconcilable problems'. 

Even before the president's message on energy, the early prospect was for fuel rationing (home fuel and petrol) either at the source or at the petrol pump. And what practically everybody in the administration sadly concedes but is not going to concede 'visibly' on TV is that there will be another stiff rise in the inflation rate. 

But there's one other bogeyman growling away in the background that I don't think the president is going to drag out for public viewing just yet, but it's one that concerns America's allies very directly. I touched on it last time in mentioning that the American volunteer army has been a flop. This is a very serious business and it comes on the heels of a decision in the White House to back America's alliances with military force, with the promise of it, anyway. In one recent week, President Carter sent an aircraft carrier off to the Arabian Sea, he shipped military advisers and materiel to North Yemen and he made an offer of jet fighters to that most necessary of America's friends, oil-rich Saudi Arabia. 

I'm quite sure, in fact I've been told, that in some countries of Western Europe, which shall be nameless, their volunteer armies are not working out either, are not in fact up to minimum strength. But I suspect there's a tendency, to put it mildly, among the NATO allies to shake the head over the sluggish recruitment figures and then go away and hope that America will provide. 

Well, since the United States abolished the draft (conscription), first of all, a great deal of money has had to be budgeted for the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen and the marines. The man who volunteers for a career in the armed forces comes these days at a considerably higher price than the man who had to go willy-nilly. Inducements was the word, by way of separate rooms, more time off, better bonuses, television and other amenities. 

Well, there aren't as many recruits as the government had figured on. In any branch of the service, only one-third of the army reserve and the National Guard units, who would be primed for combat, are at full strength. The army reserve is 100,000 men short. The air force needs another thousand pilots. The army needs another thousand doctors. The navy has half the vessels it had on call 20 years ago. 

Well, as you might guess, the Pentagon has started talking to congressmen about the need for conscription. It's a very hot word and, at present, few congressmen care to handle it. When this shortage in the armed forces was first brought up in public (and I haven't mentioned the shortage of combat supplies which, in Europe, would be critical in an early war) the public said by about 55 to 45 per cent that it was in favour of some sort of draft and the first suggestion was a national register of names to be called in an emergency, a sort of reserve draft. 

But among the young, who would be called on to serve, over 60 per cent are against any form of conscription. Already there are student protest groups being formed in over a hundred colleges and quite a few of the once-young and now middle-aged militants who led the anti-Vietnam marches have come out of the woods or the cottages where they've been living placidly since the middle of 1975. 

So, if the president or the Congress decide that the United States military establishment is falling so far behind that it cannot fulfil its promises of materiel and of manpower for the standing alliances, let alone for any eruption of conventional war, you can see this is going to be a tartar of a problem to handle with the young people who would get the draft cards. One 19-year-old out in California at Berkeley put the emotional case, 'The Government may not have learned any lesson from Vietnam, but I know that young people have'. 

Well, this view of any military commitment runs exactly counter to what the government has learned from the wars 'since' Vietnam, which is that the new conventional war doesn't have to go on for 15 years or much longer than 15 days to eat up prodigies of men and materiel. The Israeli-Arab war of 1973 killed or wounded 10,000 men, destroyed 3,000 tanks and 400 aircraft in 18 days. So the day seems to be coming pretty soon when the army, navy, air force and marines cannot just plead for recruits. 

If American promises are to mean anything at all, they will have to be backed by some sort of service on demand. It will take quite a public relations campaign to convince the young that the draft does not necessarily mean 15 years in a jungle and, at the end of it, defeat. 

In the meantime, while Americans clapped loud and long at the signing of the so-called 'peace treaty'. Most of them were letting it be known that they don't want to have to pay taxes to give the Israelis and the Egyptians as much as $5 billion worth of arms. We had better toast the so-called 'treaty' while it looks good.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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