Challenge: Fix 1976-1980

It's been a common assertion that the period of 1976 up to the early 1980's was going to be a bad period regardless of who was President, and whoever was elected in 1976 was gonna have the same problems as Carter did.

So I hand it over to you to actually find a way to fix and better address the problems of the 1976 to 1980(ish) bad years than they did in the OTL.
 
Elect someone who understands monetary and fiscal policy. The wage and price controls were pretty disastrous, and didn't effect inflation. Even though I'm no fan of hers, Thatcher understood monetary policy and helped her nation recover due to it. So elect someone who will put Volcker in charge sooner. Than have them apply a fiscal stimulus when the economy goes downhill. The combination of those two factors will go a long way in making that period of time easier. On foreign policy, continue the realism of Kissinger/Nixon and the United States will probably avoid some of the embarrassments of those years.

It's worth pointing out that while those four years were largely the product of the events preceding it (Nixon's self serving policies and the unsustainable of both guns and butter), I am of the firm belief that strong leaders can fundamentally change the direction of a country. Unfortunately, America chose Carter.
 
*Bump* 'cause there's been an oddly high barrage of other threads today which has buried this.

I may give an opinion when a few more people reply.
 
Somehow butterfly the Iranian Revolution. Prior to the 1978/1979 oil shock, the economy was making a recovery from the 1975 recession. Yes, inflation was still high, but it had fallen from double-digits to about 6-7%. Unemployment fell to a little under 6%, and GDP growth was solid. Even Carter's ratings weren't that bad - they dipped briefly into the 30s in 1978, but mostly they were in the mid-40s, roughly average for a president at the stage of their tenure.

When Iran fell into revolution, oil production dried up by the summer of 1978. Inflation started climbing again, gas shortages broke out, and then when the Shah fell all hell broke loose. Inflation surged and the Fed jacked up interest rates, which caused a sharp rise in unemployment. And of course, the revolution also directly led to the hostage crisis.

If you avoid that, you drastically change the outcome of 1979-1980. Inflation would slowly come down, interest rates would rise but not as dramatically, and you might get a shallow recession in the early '80s. Meanwhile Carter's energy policies, if continued, would keep U.S. energy consumption lower and move us away from such a petroleum-dependent economy.

How to avoid the Revolution is a much more difficult question.
 
You would have to have the UK(think it was, may have still been USA) overthrow the guy in charge in the 50s. Considering the guy they replaced him with, revolution was inveitable.
 
Well, then you'll have the Iranian Revolution, and that time is going to suck.

That's why the challenge is to address the shitty era better. The whole point of this thread is to figure out what they could have done or should have done, or anything like that. 1976-1980somethin' always comes off like a black hole of suck that would take out Ford or Reagan or whoever else could have been President then. I want you to get the spaceship out of that black hole and figure out how the situation of 1976-the Early 80's where things sucked could have been addressed better; what they could have, in their time, done economically, politically, etc, to fix and/or address the bad situations better.
 
Aside from smart suggestions earlier:

Take the opportunity to expand mass transit and rebuild the rail network. Massive public works stimulas and the avoidance to some extent of gas price in the medium term.

Use the crisis to rebuild/strengthen manufacturing by uploading their healthcare/pension obligations to the government: expand Medicare downward, expand Medicaid upward or Nixon's national health insurance proposal or adopt a new healthcare model + means-test social security and use that to expand SS for poorer people making corporate pensions less needed as well.

Bring in either pro-union policies or major corporate reform perhaps on the CEO can only make x times his least paid worker (min. wage as well) to increase the real wage of American workers (as this is when they stopped increasing and CEO/manager pay skyrocketed) and couple it with tax reform to simplify the code and copy good ideas from other countries. VAT, for instance, although probably politically impossible. Strengthening unions will also help American car companies as historically the union leadership had pushed for smaller more fuel efficient cars. If they can get those up and running in this era the Japanese companies won't eat their lunch.

(As a case study the Atlantic had an article back in 1982 or so and its on their website somewhere. It talked about a brand new heavy industrial company (steel?) that without legacy costs was on an even playing field with foreign competition.)

Speaking of car companies and industry, one could look to Germany and Japan for ideas on how to keep them around. The ideal free trade world thing is going to have to take a hit, which wouldn't be that bad a thing.

If one wants to change the deregulation of the airlines and that would also help above with rail although of course flying would remain expensive. That'd also help eventually with overcrowded airports, hubs, and so forth.

Carter's military build-up (and Reagan's, after) was unneeded in most areas and a lot of money spent there could be used on modernizing infrastructure. Again, the '70s is when the USA stopped bothering to spend money on bridges, roads, transit, sewers, water, power, etc….

If Three Mile Island can be spun in a positive PR manner (everything went wrong, nothing bad happened) then greater nuclear power investment can be another stimulas program as well as medium term helpful on gas prices and inflation.

Kill the idea of supply side economics.

Etc…. Much of this isn't politically possible or at least unlikely. But a strong President who knew how to work Congress could get quite a bit of this through (Senator, would another rail line and power plant in your state help?).
 
Elect someone who understands monetary and fiscal policy. The wage and price controls were pretty disastrous, and didn't effect inflation. Even though I'm no fan of hers, Thatcher understood monetary policy and helped her nation recover due to it.

Thatcher denied ever being a monetarist by the mid 80s, her pre-Falklands unpopularity wasn't simply the pain before recovery, her government's Friedman inspired policies were a self-admitted disaster, causing the problems inherited from Labour to go through the roof. Ultimately it was vast budget cuts and the profits from privatisation, combined with deregulation in a strong global economy that allowed Britain to move towards financial over industrial economic strength.

Now in the broad spectrum such ideas are still under the neoliberal/monetarist umbrella. I'm just saying if US politicians sat down with a Tory brain trust in the late 70s to get ideas it wouldn't have helped, indeed Reagan sort of did that and his early years were marked by the same problems.
 
Somehow butterfly the Iranian Revolution. Prior to the 1978/1979 oil shock, the economy was making a recovery from the 1975 recession. Yes, inflation was still high, but it had fallen from double-digits to about 6-7%. Unemployment fell to a little under 6%, and GDP growth was solid. Even Carter's ratings weren't that bad - they dipped briefly into the 30s in 1978, but mostly they were in the mid-40s, roughly average for a president at the stage of their tenure.

When Iran fell into revolution, oil production dried up by the summer of 1978. Inflation started climbing again, gas shortages broke out, and then when the Shah fell all hell broke loose. Inflation surged and the Fed jacked up interest rates, which caused a sharp rise in unemployment. And of course, the revolution also directly led to the hostage crisis.

If you avoid that, you drastically change the outcome of 1979-1980. Inflation would slowly come down, interest rates would rise but not as dramatically, and you might get a shallow recession in the early '80s. Meanwhile Carter's energy policies, if continued, would keep U.S. energy consumption lower and move us away from such a petroleum-dependent economy.

How to avoid the Revolution is a much more difficult question.

It's simple to avoid the Revolution. Just put your full 100% support behind the Shah and ensure that the dynasty will survive. Don't waver in support, don't push HIM on human rights and democracy, like Carter did, and work to nip the Iran insurgency in the bud. Also, Khomeini must be killed, like Michel Poinatowski proposed to the Shah. All that needs to be done is for the Shah to say yes (With maybe a bit of pressure from America) and let the D.G.S.E. do the rest! Do that and the revolution will be avoided.
 
Aside from smart suggestions earlier:
Bring in either pro-union policies or major corporate reform perhaps on the CEO can only make x times his least paid worker (min. wage as well) to increase the real wage of American workers (as this is when they stopped increasing and CEO/manager pay skyrocketed) and couple it with tax reform to simplify the code and copy good ideas from other countries. VAT, for instance, although probably politically impossible. Strengthening unions will also help American car companies as historically the union leadership had pushed for smaller more fuel efficient cars. If they can get those up and running in this era the Japanese companies won't eat their lunch.

As annoying as I think the anti-union diatribes I suffer through on Autoblog comments are, I'm not so sure on this. The American auto worker unions had a very confrontational approach and worker conduct at this time was poor. The unions in Germany and Japan on the other hand had a tendency to cooperate with management, although this partly might be attributable to the fact that in those countries the government provided many of the services, for example healthcare, that the companies paid for in the US, and to German unions having a seat on the boards of the companies they organize the workers of.

Simplifying the tax code though would probably do a world of good, although I might be projecting the modern US situation (High corporate tax rate, but a maze of loopholes, deductions, and subsidies) backward. And building good small cars, if they could manage to do it profitably, would seriously help Detroit against the Japanese. Chrysler was saved the first time in the 1980s by their switch to a lineup comprised mostly of variants of the small, fuel efficient K platform.

It's simple to avoid the Revolution. Just put your full 100% support behind the Shah and ensure that the dynasty will survive. Don't waver in support, don't push HIM on human rights and democracy, like Carter did, and work to nip the Iran insurgency in the bud. Also, Khomeini must be killed, like Michel Poinatowski proposed to the Shah. All that needs to be done is for the Shah to say yes (With maybe a bit of pressure from America) and let the D.G.S.E. do the rest! Do that and the revolution will be avoided.

If you do that, most likely you just keep the lid on longer and let the pressure continue to build. Eventually it's going to blow, and it could be more forceful than it was in our timeline.
 
It's simple to avoid the Revolution. Just put your full 100% support behind the Shah and ensure that the dynasty will survive. Don't waver in support, don't push HIM on human rights and democracy, like Carter did, and work to nip the Iran insurgency in the bud. Also, Khomeini must be killed, like Michel Poinatowski proposed to the Shah. All that needs to be done is for the Shah to say yes (With maybe a bit of pressure from America) and let the D.G.S.E. do the rest! Do that and the revolution will be avoided.

What exactly do you propose? What leverage did the United States or any major power have when, at that point, the Iranian public was close to unanimous in wanting the Shah out? And given that the Shah *was* pretty brutal in killing demonstrators, etc., for a time, being more brutal wouldn't have been particularly effective.

As for killing Khomeini? There were plenty of other hardliners, and Khomeini's death would have made him into a martyr.

In any event, any major unrest would still have had a negative effect on oil supplies and helped bring the Western world into recession.
 
Electric Monk is spot on, but you need somebody with guts that can deal with Congress effectively to get it done. I'd suggest Hubert Humphrey.
 
Instead of malaise, pull out the stops and spark some imaginations.

Revive the American SST, and make that a double-decker with at least 400-passenger capacity. Commit to unconditional support as long as prototypes are flying around by 1980.



Cancel the shuttle. Revive the Saturn V. Declare commitment to a moon-base and pedal to the medal in following through. Declare commitment to Skylab II and Skylab III.


If the Japanese can do bullet-train, then, shucks, USA can do missile-train. (coast to coast, the old way is toast!)

Declare early and often that if "21st Century" mass transit is government funded the way that highways are, progress shouldn't be a problem at all.


Lean on Chrysler to build the damn turbine car that they keep dancing around. They were able to build a freaking daily-driver turbine car with solid consumer appeal in the mid-1960s. It's time to use that pot, so to speak.


Yank up CAFE "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" requirements and establish it so that cars with alternate engines (like turbines) need not be factored in. Decree that electric-only cars (city/town commuter cars would have been doable with 70s tech, why not a two-seater with 35 miles range and pricing aided by government incentives?) would earn an extra kind of bonus for CAFE calculation. The CAFE would apply only to large-scale manufacturers, exempting "boutique" or "specialist" companies like Ferrari, Vector :)cool:), etc.


Work like hell to get internet established ahead of schedule


Aggressively support solar and wind power for areas where solar and/or wind power would be feasible. (In other words, a place like Las Vegas should be the freaking solar power capital of the planet.) This would be in conjunction with myriad energy-saving measures, including supports and incentives for tankless water heaters or water heaters with sun-heated tanks, etc.


edit: other imagination-stimulating projects could include....

high speed hydrofoil ferry services on the west and east coasts of North America

encourage widespread embrace of ultralight airplanes

decree that lightweight high-efficiency two-seat cars could bypass certain federal requirements to further support provision of inexpensive high-mpg daily-use vehicles
 
Electric Monk is spot on, but you need somebody with guts that can deal with Congress effectively to get it done. I'd suggest Hubert Humphrey.


TNF, according to your sig-linked test, I'm a libertarian communist :cool:




(Economic Left/Right: -3.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.74)
 

Thande

Donor
While some sort of uprising in Iran against the Shah was inevitable by 1976, the Iranian Revolution as we know it was not. The storm could have been ridden out if (A) The US, French and British foreign ministries had had a more realistic idea of how unpopular the Shah was, and (B) had taken early action against that. Get the Shah to go into exile and abdicate to his young son (at gunpoint if necessary), dissolve the Rastakhiz Party, temporarily put in a military regime under someone like Azhari and prepare for fresh multi-party elections. The Islamists can be attenuated if you have Khomeini die in a convenient and preferably embarrassing 'accident' (call Mossad) and allow the more moderate Ayatollahs to turn Qom into an independent clerical city state on the model of the Vatican. Ideally the National Front should win the elections and can further limit the Islamists' influence by focusing their criticism on Tudeh and the MEK and avoiding the whole religious question.

Now you might think this is a bit hand-wavy, but in fact all of the above was proposed in OTL at varying times. What you need to change is to get rid of the assumption on the part of virtually all western leaders that the Shah still enjoyed real power and popularity. Even in OTL, there are rumours that President Giscard considered having the Shah bumped off in the late 70s.
 
While some sort of uprising in Iran against the Shah was inevitable by 1976, the Iranian Revolution as we know it was not. The storm could have been ridden out if (A) The US, French and British foreign ministries had had a more realistic idea of how unpopular the Shah was, and (B) had taken early action against that. Get the Shah to go into exile and abdicate to his young son (at gunpoint if necessary), dissolve the Rastakhiz Party, temporarily put in a military regime under someone like Azhari and prepare for fresh multi-party elections. The Islamists can be attenuated if you have Khomeini die in a convenient and preferably embarrassing 'accident' (call Mossad) and allow the more moderate Ayatollahs to turn Qom into an independent clerical city state on the model of the Vatican. Ideally the National Front should win the elections and can further limit the Islamists' influence by focusing their criticism on Tudeh and the MEK and avoiding the whole religious question.

Now you might think this is a bit hand-wavy, but in fact all of the above was proposed in OTL at varying times. What you need to change is to get rid of the assumption on the part of virtually all western leaders that the Shah still enjoyed real power and popularity. Even in OTL, there are rumours that President Giscard considered having the Shah bumped off in the late 70s.


a touch brutal, but, nice!
 
While some sort of uprising in Iran against the Shah was inevitable by 1976, the Iranian Revolution as we know it was not. The storm could have been ridden out if (A) The US, French and British foreign ministries had had a more realistic idea of how unpopular the Shah was, and (B) had taken early action against that. Get the Shah to go into exile and abdicate to his young son (at gunpoint if necessary), dissolve the Rastakhiz Party, temporarily put in a military regime under someone like Azhari and prepare for fresh multi-party elections. The Islamists can be attenuated if you have Khomeini die in a convenient and preferably embarrassing 'accident' (call Mossad) and allow the more moderate Ayatollahs to turn Qom into an independent clerical city state on the model of the Vatican. Ideally the National Front should win the elections and can further limit the Islamists' influence by focusing their criticism on Tudeh and the MEK and avoiding the whole religious question.

Now you might think this is a bit hand-wavy, but in fact all of the above was proposed in OTL at varying times. What you need to change is to get rid of the assumption on the part of virtually all western leaders that the Shah still enjoyed real power and popularity. Even in OTL, there are rumours that President Giscard considered having the Shah bumped off in the late 70s.

Fair. But it would still likely lead to a period of unrest. No doubt Iran (and the world) would be better off for something like this, but you may still get a big plunge in oil production in '78/'79, which is going to make the the last years of the decade extremely difficult.

Maybe the Shah dies in 1977? He already had cancer - perhaps he develops a blood clot that kills him suddenly? There would still be a lot of dissatisfaction, but with a new regime in power and some political opening, protests cannot gain a critical mass, and the regime limps through the 1980s.
 
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