Word: underground
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pentagon's new proposal calls for 23 underground shelters to be connected by ramps to each track. Only one MX missile would be based on each oval. The missile would be moved from shelter to shelter by a TEL, for transporter-erector-launcher. Each one would be 180 ft. long, 13 ft. wide and 13.5 ft. high, roll on 24 huge tires and have a 3,250 h.p. engine. The total weight of a TEL and its missile would be 335 tons...
While the economy is dipping into a recession, a much noticed but little recorded sector of American business activity is thriving as never before. It is the underground economy, an illicit system of cash and barter in exchange for goods and services. Because it operates beyond the statistician's reach and the tax collector's grasp, no one knows its exact size and scope. But various learned economists, who find this fast-growing sector to be a fertile field for academic investigation, estimate that it runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year...
Parts of the underground economy are highly visible. Most big cities are aswarm with street hawkers, who sell from boxes and truck tailgates an astonishing variety of jewelry, clothes, toiletries, fruits vegetables and assorted schlock. Some of the stuff is "hot"; last year about $2 billion in merchandise and food was hijacked from trucks or stolen from warehouses. The rest is distress merchandise that has not moved on the store shelves and is dumped at large discounts to middlemen, who field it out to street hawkers. City governments are trying to collect sales taxes from the vendors, but the vast...
...biggest dodge in the underground economy is carried out by people who may pay tax on part of their income but demand the rest in unreported cash, usually in convenient large-denomination bills. One sign of this trend is the fast rise in the number of $100 bills in circulation -some 382 million today vs. 267 million only three years ago. In addition to his regular job as a mechanic, Mike does bodywork on damaged autos in San Francisco for cash on the cylinder head and pockets $100 to $200 a month in undeclared income. Bob, a Santa Cruz, Calif...
...surge of the underground economy reflects a troubling shift in American attitudes. So many people are fed up with inflation and high taxes that they no longer feel morally obligated to obey tax laws. Reports TIME Correspondent John Tompkins, who has covered organized crime for many years: "The underworld and the upperworld have converged in their morality over the past several decades. The underworld has not moved over to us, but we have moved in its direction." The victims, of course, are the honest taxpayers, who will have to fork over more and more to carry the load...