In the Public Interest

Well, motorists, get ready for higher auto insurance rates, higher casualty rates on the highway and more pollution, especially from trucks and diesel engines–all compliments of the Reagan administration. Notwithstanding the technical ease with which the auto company engineers could have produced cleaner, more life-saving and less damage-prone cars, the Reaganites have moved to dismantle…

Sen. Jake Garn, the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, recently confronted the siren call of political hypocrisy on a piece of legislation. He succumbed to the temptation. Throughout his six years in the Senate, the Utah Republican has always railed against regulation of business. But when a federal law prohibiting retail merchants from…

Mrs. Essie Briggs of Columbia, S.C., is not likely to be pleased with what Ronald Reagan is doing to textile workers. She put in 53 years at a cotton mill where she breathed the dense cotton dust that gave her the lung disease called byssinosis. By the mid-’60s, she recalls, “I’d go in there and…

Most consumers believe that the large ‘economy-size” package in the supermarket gives them a lower price per unit than the smaller size of the same brand. A new study in Rhode Island shows that too often the reality is just the reverse. In short, there is a widespread prevalence of a “quantity surcharge.” Students and…

On March 22, 1981, the cost of mailing a first-class letter will go to 18 cents from the current 15 cents. But the stamp will be a non-denominational “B” postage stamp. This indicates that the postal service’s board of governors is not satisfied. It wants at least 20 cents to be the price you pay…

Cruel deeds camouflaged by velvet words are gushing from Ronald Reagan and his associates in great numbers these days. If you voted for Mr. Reagan, you may wish to ponder the following checklist of Reaganite actions and words since Jan. 20, 1981. Transferred the remaining pricing power over oil produced in the U.S. to the…

In spite of the fact that 145 fatalities occur each day on the nation’s highways, and thousands more are injured, the future of the federal auto-safety program is in doubt. The new secretary of transportation, Drew Lewis, is adding to the uncertainty over this lifesaving program with a remarkable zigzag verbal per­formance over the last…

It was a television advertisement from the mid-’70s. The blue-collar worker shuffles home from work, enters his living room, plunks himself down in his favorite easy chair and takes off his shoes. His wife, heading toward the kitchen to prepare the evening meal, crosses past his stocking feet and suddenly collapses. The ad announcer then…

In 1913, the parents of Anna and Mary Constanti moved into an eight room house in an East Detroit neighborhood called Poletown. Anna, now 73 years old, and Mary, now 69, still live in the same house. They have kept their home in good physical repair and the back yard is filled with 60 rose…

No one can fairly accuse Ronald Reagan of reading or thinking very much. But he does a superb regurgitation of what his advisers feed him. Such a foren­sic performance occurred Feb. 5 in his televised address on the state of the economy. As has been his practice for 20 years, Reagan told the American people…