The recent Summit Conference on inflation tried to place the blame on all the wrong people: business, labor, the farmer, and even the consumer! The Summit conferees labored and brought forth such people-punishing proposals as a ten cents a gallon tax on gasoline and advice that American consumers should buy less and “be patient.” Almost everyone at the conference ignored the inflation-causing policies of the Federal Government, These include:
1. The double devaluation of the U.S. dollar, in 1971 and 1973, which officially reduced its buying power 20 percent.
2. The 1968 decision by President Lyndon Johnson and Congress to withdraw the 25 percent gold backing for all our money, and to sell $10 billion of our gold to foreigners at the below-market price of $35 per ounce. Under the money policies of the liberals, Americans were forbidden to exchange our dollars into gold, but foreigners could. The international speculators converted their dollars into gold at a scandalous rate and shipped it overseas, until they were finally stopped by President Nixon in August 1971. The gold that the international speculators pulled out of Fort Knox is now worth 4 ½ times as much because of the rise in the world price of gold.
3. The fantastic foreign giveaway programs that have doled out $200 billion of the taxpayers’ money to 138 foreign countries. These, plus the interest paid on the money borrowed for these giveaways, are responsible for more than half of our entire national debt.
4. The network of special-privilege laws lobbied through Congress that require the American taxpayers to make good the losses of U.S. businesses that invest in foreign countries. Since there is no such insurance for business losses inside the United States, smart money went to build factories and create jobs overseas.
5. The policy of using U.S. taxpayers’ money to make loans to the Soviet Union at six and seven percent in order to finance the largest truck factory in the world, the largest fertilizer factory in the world, the largest tanker shipyard in the world, one of the largest computer plants in the world, and the largest grain purchases ever made. George Meany is one of the few national leaders who have spoken out publicly about what these Foreigners First policies mean to the American economy. He said: “The prime rate in the United States now is 12 percent. We have been lending hundreds of millions, however, to the Soviet Union at a time when millions of hard-working Americans cannot get mortgage money to buy a home. … If we are short of fertilizer, then instead of investing in fertilizer plants at home, we invest in fertilizer plants in the Soviet Union.”
6. The policy of making us dependent on foreign oil by forbidding any drilling of the billions of barrels of oil reserves off our Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and by blocking the Alaskan pipeline for four years.
The Summit Conference should have placed the blame for inflation where it belongs — on the U.S. Government policies that are based on deficit spending and that discriminate against Americans for the benefit of foreigners.
