58 a bus to Saginaw, where they boarded a United Airlines flight for the 21-minute, $25 puddle jump to Flint. There they were met by their bus and returned to Frankenmuth. One night last week, 55 travelers plunked down $20 each for the 11:30 p.m. United flight from Akron to Cleveland, a 22-minute trip that normally draws about four paying passengers & week. The attraction was not Cleveland's glamorous night life. These people were all rushing to get the famous half-price coupons, which entitle the traveler to a 50% discount on any United flight in the continental US. from July 1 through Dec. 15. Indeed, people hustling after the discount have bought out United's $14 flights from Los Angeles to San Diego through June 17, the last day of the big giveaway. United began offering the coupons May 28 in an effort to lure back passengers it had lost during a 53-day flight mechanics strike. Soon United's freebie was matched by American Airlines. By the time the promotion ends, United figures that both airlines will have passed out more than 6 million coupons. One determined fellow booked a single-day odyssey starting in Cleveland and whipping through Youngstown, Akron, Youngstown (again), Pittsburgh and back to Cleveland to collect five coupons. Ads offering top dollar for coupons have appeared in newspapers. Coupon traders flocked to airports, and last week the going price jumped from $5 to $20. The Federal Government, the state of California and many corporations have insisted that employees clip coupons to their expense accounts. United claims that total bookings rose in one day to 194,000 from the normal 135,000, but it and American may not be able to meet the increased demand. With the grounding of the DC-10, United lost 23% of its available seats and American lost 25%. So far, none of their competitors have offered similar discounts, though TWA was embarrassed when the New York Times ran an ad announcing TWA's half-fare coupons. In fact, the airline had prepared the ad only as a contingency measure. TWA quickly announced that the ad was in error because, a spokesman said huffily, half-fare coupons are "crazy and uneconomical." Economy & Business Executive View/Marshall Loeb Her Hand Is on the Future It would not be a stretch to call her Alice in Wonderland. In the behind-the-mirfor world of Washington, where many things are curiouser and curiouser, and even the knaves have to run faster to keep up, Alice Rivlin is the self-professed "official purveyor of bad news to the Congress." As head of the Congressional Budget Office, she and her 200-person staff figure out what proposed programs will really cost, and her cool counsel has stopped many of them in the gleam-in-the-eye stage. When she got the job in 1975, Economist Rivlin, 48, an Indiana-bred Bryn Mawr magna who had labored 22 years at the left-listing Brookings Institution and in the bureaucracy, faced two hurdles. Many in Capitol Hill's chauvinist bastion gossiped that the Judy Garland look-alike would be, well, too feminist, too liberal. But she has proved that sex does not count in political economics, and her balanced judgments have made her popular even with conservatives. As much as anybody in Washington, Rivlin has her fingers on the future. That is because they grasp the federal budget, which is the nation's road map and hope chest, the one document that brings together the Government's plans and priorities. And what she sees makes her fairly optimistic. For one thing, the growth of regulation is waning. "We have had this orgy of regulation over the past few years," she says. "We have regulated the hell out of everything-the environment, health and safety. We have gone to absurd lengths." The Government's inflation-terrified economists are passionately battling the regulators, who Rivlin feels are a bit hysterical in defending their turf. "But," she notes, "nobody says that we want to deregulate everything. Gradually, the regulatory excesses are being sorted out." Also, Congress is gaining much better control over rabbit-hole spending by moving toward longer planning. Says Rivlin: "The most important thing that happened with the fiscal 1980 budget is that Congress for the first time went beyond a single year's spending and voted at least tentative budget targets for three years. Now we have been pushing for five-year goals." These goals will help legislators make cuts in spending on an orderly basis with plenty of advance notice. As she says, "You really wouldn't want to live in a country where many programs are changed quickly." Budget Watcher Alice Rivlin Rivlin argues that spending cannot be substantially brought down until Congress is willing to tackle the legislated pensions, subsidies and other transfer pay. ments to retired civil servants, veterans, farmers and other politically vindictive constituencies. To call these payments "uncontrollables" is, she contends, a copout. Congress enacted them, and Congress can change them. Unless a health insurance plan is enacted, she feels, the fast rises in Government outlays are basically finished. "We have built almost all of the interstate highway system, and we don't need another one. Because the baby boom is finished, the pressure to increase spending on schools is mostly over. The jumps in Social Security taxes are likely to be much smaller. We are basically home free until the year 2010, when the baby-boom kids will become the elderly." Soon the US. will start enjoying some benefits from the slump in the birth rate, which started 15 years ago. Says Rivlin: "In the 1980s we are going to have fewer people coming into the labor force, and so finding jobs for them will not be so difficult. The crime rate will drop. Most crimes are committed by poople aged 15 to 25, and there just aren't going to be as many of them as before." To remedy inflation, Rivlin has her own prescription: "Do everything that you can think of because there is no simple answer. At a hearing on the Hospital Cost Containment Act, one Congressman told me, "This will cut the Consumer Price Index by only 4%, and that's not very much.' Well, it is not very much, but it is worth doing, if you are doing a lot of other things too. Hospital cost containment will help, some deregulation will help, strategies to increase supplies will help." None of these measures will be easy to accomplish. But, Rivlin points out, "nobody ever said that democracy was easy. They only said that it was better than any other form of Government." TIME, JUNE 18, 1979 CITIBANK SEOUL, KOREA ATTENTION: K.. S. LEE CITIBANK NEW YORK ADVISES THAT YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO CONFIRM PLEASE ADVISE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. REGARDS, GEORGE E. STOCKTON, DIRECTOR OF INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUCTION AGC AGTN RCA JUN 08 0538 AGC AGTN CITIBK K23293 AGC AGTN TO ASSOCIATED GENERAL CONTRACTORS OF AMERICA WASHINGTON DC JUN08/79 ATTN GEORGE E STOCKTON DIRECTOR OF INTL CONSTRUCTION CITICORP INTERNATIONAL GROUP(CITIBANK AND APCO) ORGANIZED AND N NNN KS LEE AGC AGTN CITIEK K23293... Korean-American confrontation Traveling Korean-contractors, visiting at the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) in Washington, D.C., last week, expressed interest in joint venturing with Americans abroad: They don't see themselves operating in the U.S. as previously reported (ENR 10/12 p. 3), but they wouldn't turn down any good deal. A good deal in their view is a joint venture that helps them qualify to bid a job or adds to their management and technology capability in doing the work. AGC members expressed concern about loss of a Korean joint venture partner precluded by his government from joining i competition against a Korean company bidding alone. L CONSTRUCTION WEEK Industry calls for panel to assess cancer risks— Industry asked environmentalists last week to support establishment of an independent panel of scientific experts to develop uniform national standards for testing, classifying and regulating cancer-causing materials. Jackson B. Browning, environmental affairs director at Union Carbide Corp., New York City, echoed the idea proposed earlier this year by the American Industrial Health Council. Both the public and government regulators need a more objective means of assessing cancer risks, he says. Westinghouse urged to settle uranium disputoA federal judge in Richmond, Va., has given Westinghouse Electric Co., Pittsburgh, 45 days to settle out of court with seven utilities for failing to deliver on uranium supply contracts. Otherwise, the firm must pay $2 billion in damages awarded to the utilities in March. Three utilities made out-of-court deals with Westinghouse earlier this year; one, Houston Lighting & Power Co.; recently agreed to a $350million settlement: Westinghouse says it should not have to honor its contracts because an international cartel has pushed up the price of uranium seven-fold. EPA beefs about Golden Fleece award The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has received Sen. William Proxmire's (D-Wis.) Golden Fleece award for a $68,000 study on how to prevent agricultural runoff into streams from cow manure. EPA contends that manure is a significant cause of nonpoint pollution. The study was intended to determine the best methods for winter storage of manure. |