What happened to prices between 1952 and 1998
Between 1952 and 1998, the Consumer Price Index went from 26.5 to 163. Cumulatively, prices increased 515.1%, which works out to an average of 4.03% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1952 bought what $0.16 buys in 1998.
Consumer prices rose 1.9% in 1952, down sharply from 1951’s 7.9% as the price and wage controls imposed the year before held the cost of living in check even with the Korean War still underway. Labor strife tested those controls that spring: to head off a strike that could have disrupted war production, President Truman ordered the government to seize the steel industry that April, over the objections of steel companies fighting the price the Office of Price Stabilization had set for their product. The Supreme Court ruled the seizure unconstitutional in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that June, a landmark limit on presidential power, and steelworkers then struck for 53 days before a settlement. Politics delivered the year’s biggest change that November: Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson, promising to “go to Korea” to end the war and returning Republicans to the White House for the first time since 1933. The Cold War’s technological edge sharpened that same month, when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, a device hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs used against Japan in 1945. Consumer prices finished 1952 167.7% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.