75-02-A1
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Inflation Fighting
TranscriptYou wouldn't expect to find gold in a garbage can but that's pretty much what happened in Tucson, Arizona. I'll be right back. They say that money talks. Lately you can't hang on to it long enough to hear what it's saying, and given the state of affairs in Washington it's likely that Congress will wrangle for weeks over the president's economic proposals before it accomplishes anything. Meanwhile, it's harder than ever to hang on to that money, but the American people are a resourceful lot and many of them are finding their own ways to fight inflation, cut down on energy use and save money in the bargain. Lately I've been collecting some of these ideas for fighting inflation it adds up to quite a checklist. Some of the ideas are simple, even obvious, others are unusual and inventive. Many of them have come in the mail in recent weeks from all parts of the country. Others I've gleaned from the news. I'd like to share some of them with you. A Los Angeles businessman who supplies restaurants, hotels, schools and hospitals with refrigeration, air conditioning, and food service equipment has a simple idea that could save billions of dollars. He advocates restaurants and institutions cutting down on meal portions by about 10 percent. In the case of the restaurants, he proposes passing the dollar savings right onto the customers in the form of lowered menu prices. He also thinks housewives should adopt the reduced meal portion formula. He has a point. For the last two years, a University of Arizona professor and his students have been analyzing the garbage of a representative sampling of Tucson homes. They discovered that Tucson families throw out nearly 10,000 tons of good food every year. It was like finding gold, for this amounts to a waste of something between nine and eleven million dollars worth of meat, vegetables, and other edibles. In fact the survey concludes that the typical Tucson housewife throws out at least 10 percent of all the groceries she brings home from the market. Despite inflated prices in 1974, she wasted more food that year than the year before. It's hard to imagine the Tucson housewives are much different in their habits than those in Buffalo, Tampa, or Milwaukee. If every homemaker in the nation cut down on meal portions by 10 percent, waste would be reduced, she'd save money and we'd have more food to provide those parts of the world where shortages and even starvation are chronic. While she's at it, Mrs. Typical Homemaker might also reinstitute the clean plate club, that for years was a tradition in thrift-minded American homes with youngsters. There are a lot more suggestions on the list I've been compiling, many of them result in small savings, like the proposal of the California lady who recycles the tag ends of soap bars and makes new ones from them. She figures she saves five dollars a year this way. I can see from the list that it wouldn't take many of the small items to add up to a healthy percentage of the average household budget widely adopted the checklist would produce significant energy conservation, too. I'd like to share it with you if you drop me a line care of the station, I'll send you a copy of the inflation fighting checklist. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for list-ning. |
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