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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (239853)	12/13/2013 2:22:33 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 542009

good grief-- You don't get to have it both ways; either he helped to destroy the unions and so squelched inflation - OR - he did nothing and so can't be blamed for squelching the unions. This of course is one isolated example. Actually, I do "get to have it both ways": he did help to break unions and he did almost nothing to squelch inflation. It was Volcker braving death threats by continually raising real interest rates that did the heavy lifting in breaking inflation. It wasn't unions that caused inflation, it was inflation that caused unions to ask for higher and higher pay increases, and it was inflation that led companies to give them to them--as well as give their own managements higher and higher salaries. Of course, worker salaries have gone down in real terms along with union membership and management salaries have not (at least, upper management salaries have not).