There’s been a lot said and written about Jimmy Carter since the former president’s death more than a week ago.
To me, he did poorly as president, but excelled after his term at many things. Most admirable was his longtime housebuilding work for Habitat for Humanity.
I was a teenager when Carter was president, so my worldly experience was limited at the time. But I can remember something during those years that helps explain why he became so unpopular.
In 1978, at age 16, I started working in a movie theater, making the princely wage of $2.35 an hour. I worked as a ticket-taker at the auditorium entrances, and also in the concession stand.
It was occasionally hectic, like on Friday and Saturday nights, but it was great fun, with an added bonus of getting to see free movies.
I worked at the four-screen Elmwood Cinema all the way to August 1979, and then returned for at least two summers afterward, maybe three.
With a staff of almost all teenagers, except the manager, it was very big drama in 1979 when we were told we would have to start recording the temperatures in each auditorium every hour.
This was due to a directive from the federal government designed to reduce the use of oil. The Carter administration said thermostats in public buildings could not be set below 78 degrees in warm weather or above 65 in cold weather.
I can remember going into auditoriums while a movie was playing, shining a little light on the thermostat and writing down its number on a sheet to track the temperature for the entire business day.
Everybody griped about it, especially the customers, because a warm theater during a New Orleans summer can be an unpleasant place.
I don’t recall how long we kept getting the thermostat readings, although I know that nobody ever got in trouble if the temperature was below 78 for a couple of hours.
In a Google search, I found out that in 1981, a month after taking office, President Reagan ended the program, saying it was an excessive regulatory burden.
The UPI story that I found credited Carter’s program for saving 300,000 barrels of oil per day, and preventing the need to import 123 million barrels.
That’s a surprisingly positive result, but I’ll bet anybody who knew about it didn’t care, because they were working or dining or seeing a movie in a building where their comfort was a secondary issue.
I was a kid in the 1970s, but I sure remember what a big deal the price of oil became during that decade.
One Friday night during the Arab oil embargo of 1973, I recall my mom saying she had to run quickly to the Shell station before it closed, because the price of gasoline was going up the next day — from its current 49 cents to the new 59 cents.
Today we all would laugh at those numbers. But it was a 20% rise overnight, and it rattled car owners like my parents. They were used to gasoline that cost 20 or 25 cents.
Most of the 1970s, in fact, was beset by inflation that took years to wring out of the system. Carter gets blamed for many things, but he wanted a qualified Federal Reserve chairman “who would confront inflation head-on,” says Wikipedia. In 1979, he picked Paul Volcker for the job.
Volcker’s Fed once raised interest rates by 5 percentage points in a single day. He let the prime rate go to 21%, which led to this warning from my dad: Don’t ever borrow money at these interest rates!
Which, true story, led to this response from 19-year-old me, though I can’t recall whether I said it to him or just thought it to myself: What is an interest rate, anyway?
There are some lessons from those teenage experiences of so long ago. One is that rapid inflation is a recipe for public discontent. This certainly is one reason Carter lost in 1980. The higher interest rates didn’t help, either. And inflation is part of why Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t win last year’s election.
Another lesson is that the American political and economic system is built to correct extremes like inflation.
The Fed’s rate hikes got the economy back in business by 1983. Most likely, that’s where we’re heading today — even if you don’t know anything about interest rates.
