My Dad Really, Really Hates Jimmy Carter.

January 21, 2016 10:57 AM

My father swears that at some point during the Carter Administration, President Carter instituted a national wage freeze, such that no employer, public or private, was permitted to give any employee a raise, supposedly to put the brakes on inflation. He further claims that this had happened to him in whatever year it was, causing family hardship. He was working in construction for a private company at that time. What, if anything, is he actually remembering?

After I heard Dad's story, I was like, surely this can't be a real thing, how would the President even have the authority to tell people what they could pay their employees, and if this is something that really happened then how come I've never heard anything about it before?

Some digging around on-line turned up a 1977 newspaper article in which public employees were complaining about having received a mere 6.5% pay increase, the same as a prior year under Pres. Ford, rather than the 9-10% increase the unions wanted. I also found a report that Carter had at one point (no date) briefly suspended military pay raises. Both of those are within my understanding of what the government can do, so my original guess was that Dad's employer declined to give him a raise at some point, and lied to him about why, possibly referring to the military wage freeze as part of the justification. Dad, being a dumb kid at the time, just didn't look into it any further and resented Carter for the rest of his life. (Which wouldn't be in character for Dad now, but maybe he was more happy-go-lucky in the late 70s.)

But then I ran into the Wikipedia article about "Nixon Shock," which says that President Nixon, in 1971, actually had frozen "wages and prices for 90 days" via Executive Order 11615. Which made it plausible that Dad (who graduated high school in 1970 and was therefore likely employed in 1971) actually did have his wages frozen briefly in 1971, and his current blinding hatred of Democrats and everything they stand for is powerful enough to cause him to misremember this as being something Carter did to him, instead of Nixon. (It should be noted that he voted for Carter in 1980 -- the last time he voted for any Democrat, I'm pretty sure -- so he didn't seem too furious about it at the time.) Except that he swears it happened during the construction job, and he only worked that job during the Carter Administration.

So my question is basically, 1) is a national wage freeze in fact something that a President can make happen, and 2) if so, did Carter ever actually do this?

For extra credit, if the answer to 2) is also yes, then why have I never heard it brought up by Republicans as evidence of the evils of Democrats in general and Jimmy Carter in particular?

posted by Spathe Cadet to Law & Government (9 answers total)

I don't remember Carter doing that. As you say, Nixon did that, and I think your dad is confused.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:01 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

1) is a national wage freeze in fact something that a President can make happen

Yes, after a fashion. As you found, Nixon did it. It didn't work (in the sense that it didn't produce the desired result, not in the sense that no one obeyed it), and likely no President will ever do it again.

2) if so, did Carter ever actually do this?

Nope. Your dad's wrong. Maybe his bosses told him that Carter did it, maybe he's just misremembering the timeline.
posted by Etrigan at 11:03 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

Best answer: He's talking about the Wage-Price guidelines.
posted by saladin at 11:04 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]

1) No, not very effectively. Outside of government employees, it would be very difficult to enforce a mandatory freeze.
2) Carter proposed a *voluntary* limit to a 7% maximum yearly increase in wages

The problems Carter encountered were inherited from Nixon, and there were many attempts to control steep inflation, this proposal was just one.

Here's the text of Carter's speech outlining the program to the country.
posted by quince at 11:05 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I should add: he's misremembering/mischaracterizing the Wage-Price guidelines. Either that, or maybe an employer lied to him and blamed them for an unrelated company wage freeze.
posted by saladin at 11:10 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, everybody. (From Saladin's link, "workers earning less than $4.00 per hour on October 1, 1978, were not subject to the pay standard," which makes me think it probably didn't even apply to him at the time. *sigh*)
posted by Spathe Cadet at 11:30 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

There was Ford's Whip Inflation Now, which froze wages and prices to stop inflation. It was laughable.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:55 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I listened to a Planet Money podcast recently that addressed this very thing.

I was a young child when Carter was in office, but based on this podcast and my own recollection of these efforts to try to repeal the laws of supply and demand, I'd say by the time Carter was in there this was stuff he was trying to wind down, not based on his own ideas of what should be done.
posted by randomkeystrike at 3:18 PM on January 21, 2016

+1 on the Planet Money podcast, which focused on Paul Volker (whom Carter appointed to head the Fed), and how he broke collective Americans' expectation that double-digit inflation was a permanent part of economic life by exercising a stranglehold on the economy. It took about three years of record unemployment along with that persistent inflation rate before the rate finally dropped below 8% or so in 1982. That, along with the beginnings of globalization, mark the beginnings of the evisceration of the American middle class, which is of course still with us today.
While there's tons of books and old articles on that period, Springsteen's first three albums from the 80s stand out as coming from the point of view of those who were hit the hardest.

I understand your father's opinions. I personally don't blame them Carter. I believe he had no interest in covering up how America was being affected by economic developments like his successor (or, after reading Thomas Mallon's Finale, a fictional account of the later Reagan years, more like his team).
posted by morspin at 10:48 PM on January 22, 2016