Humdingering

MY GRANDMOTHER is perturbed. It reminds me of 1972 when she took an early lead in the conversation and managed to tell me to vote for McGovern before I could tell her. This time she thinks the economy is dying and the Arabs are getting rich while the politicians piddle around with their teapot tempests. Cutting up the chicken for Sunday lunch two weeks ago, she told me I better find out about those prices and that oil business because it's going to be the next humdinger.

What provokes my grandmother are the headlines in the Laurel (Mississippi) Leader-Call blaring about the tug-of-war in Washington over decontrol of oil prices. President Ford's position is that oil prices need to go up so that we'll use less oil and eventually become energetically independent from imported oil. This seems suspect to my grandmother. Why, just the other day she heard him and Mr. Kissinger on the TV jawboning at the Arabs about how bad it would be for the world economy if they were to raise their prices this fall. And oil is oil to my grandmother. "I know I don't hear too well any more, so I can't really trust the TV for my news; but what are the Democrats in Washington doing?" she asked me.

Which took me back. I embraced Washington passionately for two months this summer; the strip mine veto, Stanley Hathaway, the monthly unemployment figures, the New Hampshire election, you name them, they were all incredibly vital to me. I read incessantly, argued loudly, reasoned occasionally, all hectically. Then I went home, and put my mind out to pasture. But here was my grandmother, who thought I was an expert on these political things because I always agreed with her at the dining room table while all the aunts and uncles were grinning and clucking about how silly an old lady can get sometime, McGovern indeed! I told her that the Democrats were on the right track.

The Democratic majority in Congress originally imposed price controls on "old oil" (domestic oil in fields developed before 1972) because its price was rising in sympathy with the OPEC world price, while Congress felt that the producers needed no further incentive to get the oil out of the ground. That rationale still holds, and there is more. Old oil now supplies about 40 per cent of America's oil needs, and under controls is worth approximately $60 billion. Without controls, BINGO! that oil costs $160 billion. The difference would come from consumers and go to oil companies. President Ford assures us that he'll put a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, and use the revenues to finance tax rebates that will stimulate the economy. But the Democrats would rather the companies never even got their greasy, oily hands on the money--accountants these days are camouflage experts. More importantly, they see the disastrous effects decontrol would have on the economy. A hundred billion dollars of spending power wiped out with one veto. A net withdrawal of spending power, even with tax rebates. A downward pull on an economy which has just bottomed out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and is bouncing upward like a soggy ball-bearing. Charles Schults of the Brookings Institution, supported by Congressional Budget Office and Joint Economic Committee studies, says that with decontrol on top of the expected OPEC price increase in October, we'll be plunged back into recession. Only it will be worse this time, because we'll be starting in the depths and then diving.

WHEN I START talking about the dire straits we could fall to, my grandmother says things like, "Well and it won't be long before the Lord'll come and take me home. I'm tired and I'm ready." All personal considerations aside, though, I sure hope she's around next November. She'll vote for a candidate who wants to keep old oil controlled, to mandate high-milage cars from Detroit, to require energy efficiency reports from the 2000 largest energy users, to give tax incentives for good insulation. Her candidate will probably call for antitrust action and legislation to break up the vertical and horizontal integration of the oil companies, to restore competition to the energy business. She'll pick the one who says that conservation is the best new source of energy, who will offer leadership and incentives to conserve instead of higher prices.

Grandmother probably doesn't and won't know anything about all of that. She won't be able to tell you why she is voting that way, except maybe "he looks you in the eye." But in November 1976 she will have gone right to the heart of it, again.

HUMDINGER. Yes, indeed. Jerry Ford hums and we all get dingered. Nero, at least, had the good taste to play a fiddle.