Business: Inflation: Who Is Hurt Worst?

Living costs have doubled since 1967, and the impact varies widely

Just as it has been doing each week for months, inflation last week pumped up the prices that Americans paid for their goods and services by another $3 billion or so. Billions of this, trillions of that: it is beginning to sound as if the national currency were McDonald's hamburgers. More than all the other measurements of gloom, the one statistic that people can really grasp and feel is that the U.S. enters 1979 with prices almost exactly double what they were in 1967, the date that the government uses to mark the beginning of the inflationary spiral.

The last decade has brought the most damaging price surge in the nation's history, and the elusive goal of relative stability remains far away. Though Americans are bringing home the richest paychecks of their lives, runaway prices have made the dreams of a decade earlier now seem like taunting fantasies. Almost everyone is suffering, and the pain for some is far worse than for others. The impact depends on a person's age, job, family status, region, buying and investing habits and many other factors.

The key question is not how much a family earns, but how it spends the money. To get as complete a picture as possible of the effects of inflation on Americans, the Labor Department periodically updates the 400-odd components in its Consumer Price Index, discarding products like pedal pushers and bobby pins and adding new items such as jogging suits and pocket calculators. As a general survey of how Americans spend, the technique is valid enough. But consumers are not automatons; they are 220 million individuals.

Prices can fluctuate widely for the same product or service in different communities. In fact, as indicated in the accompanying diagram of some 22 consumer items in Atlanta, a city chosen by TIME because it closely parallels national price trends, a large number of goods and services have risen far more than 100% since 1967, while others have gone up much less. Only one item—long-distance phone calls—has declined. (In many cities, of course, the cost of person-to-person and collect calls has risen substantially.)

Nationally, the steepest rises have come in life's necessities: food, clothing, shelter, transportation. Since poor people have less money to start with, they have been squeezed harder than the mad-as-hell middle class and affluent people. In Atlanta, however, housing is an exception. Overbuilding in recent years has held prices down. A three-bedroom house at $54,000 is still far beyond the reach of someone earning even twice as much as $6,191 a year, which is the federally set "poverty level" for a nonfarm family of four. But the average price of a house in Atlanta seems like a fire-sale bargain compared with the six-figure tags on similar homes in many parts of the North and West.