No joke. For the Military, it sucked.
Really, for everybody but desk-sitting governmental bureaucrats, it sucked.
I was young, and just getting started, about 1980. It's true Reagan was shortly thereafter elected in a massive landslide, but the mess was such that it took even him--and no help from the obstructionists Vast Teddy and Tipsy O'Neill--three or four years to fix most of the problems.
The Republicans suffered minor losses in the 1982 mid-term elections, as the public forgot who'd gotten us into this mess in the first place, and had expected big changes like, really fast.
But by late 1983 or early 1984, all was getting well again, and the public re-elected Reagan with an even larger margin than they'd elected him the first time around.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Ronald Reagan-George Bush presidencies, twelve years, was the longest stretch of uninterrupted growth in American history.
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But earlier than that, say from about early 1978 through the rest of the Jimmy Carter presidency and into about a year of the Reagan presidency (but it wasn't his fault; he couldn't stop things right on their tracks), there was that rampant inflation.
UPCs weren't in common use then; grocery stores still either stamped prices in ink on cans and boxes, or applied little stickers to them with prices printed on them.
I'm sure everybody who was grocery shopping at the time was used to seeing items with multiple price-tags, one applied on top of another, or old prices blacked out with a Magic Marker.
A can of beans, for example, sitting on the shelves for three months, would've started out at 16 cents, then covered over with 19 cents, then a third sticker saying 25 cents, and then a fourth sticker saying 29 cents, and so on.
And through Lincoln drove caravans of the late 1970s version of "Okies," those desperately unemployed, their families and possessions stuffed into large older sedans and station wagons, as they fled the rust belt states, hoping to find work in places such as Texas or California.
We called them the "black license plate people," as that was the color of Michigan license plates at the time, but they were also from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and somesuch.
I'm sure everybody else noticed it at the time, all these unemployed going south or west, but nowadays it seems as if no one remembers them. And there were lots of them.
