shouted Richard Nixon to a Cleveland, Ohio, crowd in 1960, “if you want to inflate your money, if you want to raise your prices, you have our opponents to vote for.” In 1961 many an expert, who assumed that inflation was certain to accompany recovery, thought the Vice President’s reasoning wrong but his prediction right. John Kennedy proved his prediction to be wrong as well. The experts did not lack faith in Kennedy. They simply knew that price rises had usually occurred during rapid economic expansion—that Kennedy’s increases in defense, space and antirecession spending would produce the kind of large Budget deficits assumed to produce inflation—that traditional Democratic sympathies for the worker and farmer usually led to higher wages and food prices—that traditional Democratic opposition to high interest rates and hard money also invited inflation—and that the President had no power to prevent powerful industries and unions from adopting inflationary price and wage increases.
