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These days, it's easier to find an intelligent Kramer supporter than a working miner. Almost half -- 44 percent -- of the farms and ranches in Colorado lost money last year; a fifth of them face imminent visits from the banker, sheriff or auctioneer. Mountain real estate, recently so coveted that it could be chopped up and sold in fractions of a year, now depresses the market.
You can look just about anywhere else in the Colorado economy without much danger of blinding yourself with a bright spot. High tech? Lay-offs in Boulder County. Low tech? Lumberjacks and gandy dancers get laid off, too. Winter recreation? The ski areas were disappointed in the past season. Summer tourism? The anticipated hordes have yet to invade this year.
During this election year, candidates of all persuasions have offered solutions to our economic woes: improving highways, establishing enterprise zones, putting boosters on the road, throwing money into trash cans.
However, they have all overlooked a certain source of prosperity for Colorado.
To find it, we need only look back to 1980. Climax Molybdenum employed 5,000 miners and proposed a $1 billion investment on Mount Emmons as coal and metal mines elsewhere boosted production and payrolls. Exxon had announced gargantuan plans to convert Western Slope rocks into metropolitan air pollution. Bankers were pestering Colorado farmers to borrow more money. New office buildings sprouted weekly in downtown Denver. Rocky Mountain real estate, from sagebrush ranches to plywood time-share condos, sold almost as quickly as it could be listed.
What did we have then that we don't have now?
In a word, inflation. Molybdenum had risen from $1.92 a pound in 1970 to $9 in 1980, silver from $1.77 an ounce to $20.63, gold from $36.40 to $612.60, soft coal from $6.26 a ton to $26.29, oil from $3.18 a barrel to $21.59, wheat from $1.48 a bushel to $4.30, beef from 49 cents a pound to $1.07, softwood from $41.90 per thousand board feet to $432.20.
As long as these commodity prices were going up like that -- an average annual rate of almost 30 percent -- Colorado boomed. But when Ronald Reagan kept a 1980 campaign promise and reduced inflation to a negligible rate, prices for Colorado products didn't just stablize.
Instead, values plunged. Molybdenum fell 60 percent, silver 75 percent, gold 44 percent, coal 27 percent, oil 47 percent, wheat 42 percent, beef 41 percent and wood 61 percent.
When prices drop like this, Colorado's economy suffers mightily, and this has always been so.
During a period of inflation -- the late 1880s -- Colorado grew rapidly as its farms and industries thrived. Wheat rose from 77 cents a bushel in 1887 to 96 cents in 1891, the year that soft coal reached $1.11 a ton. An ounce of silver fetched 94 cents in 1888 and climbed to $1.05 in two years.
But in 1893, the federal government began to insist upon a sound dollar. Wheat quickly fell to 56 cents a bushel, coal to 86 cents a ton, silver to 63 cents an ounce.
Inflation had been brought under control. Thousands of Coloradans, however, lost their jobs as mines and mills closed in the Panic of 1893. Hundreds of farmers were foreclosed, and shops throughout the West locked their doors for the last time. Sound familiar?
Back then, though, our regional politicians were bold
enough to advocate the sure remedy for Colorado. They
campaigned for the free and unlimited coinage of
silver.
This would put more money into circulation,
thus raising prices and causing inflation, and thereby
making Colorado prosper. They were right; Colorado has
always boomed during inflationary periods.
Fiscal policy is a federal concern, not a state matter, so whom we elect as governor this year will have little effect on Colorado's prosperity. However, both of our U.S. senators have been touted as presidential prospects for 1988. Should they run, we'll get to see where their true loyalties lie.
Will they mouth the usual platitudes about protecting pensions and savings accounts, thus demonstrating that they don't care about the economic well-being of us voters back home? Or will Gary Hart and Bill Armstrong have the courage to campaign for what has always been good for the Colorado economy -- rampant runaway Carter-era double-digit inflation?
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