| Sumario: | In this article the authors reply back to professors Charles B. Garrison and Anne Mayhew regarding Vietnam war. A preliminary point regarding the Garrison-Mayhew approach involves their use of the GNP gap. On January 15, 1951, in the sixth month of the first year of escalation in the Korean War, the consumer price index (CPI) was 181.5, already 6.64 percent above its pre-escalation level of 170.2 in June 1950. In striking contrast, as of March 1966, the CPI at 112.0 was only 1.6 percent above its pre-escalation level of 110.2 six months earlier in September 1965. A prefacing central theme has to do with Garrison and Mayhew's treatment of the inflation beginning with 1968. To attribute the inflation from 1968 through 1973 overwhelmingly, as do they, to the Vietnam escalation and de-escalation, in view of the number of professionally acknowledged competing hypotheses, is nothing short of an elementary statistical error. It is quite possible to entertain for this period cost-push, administered price, monetarist, deficit-monetarist, or bottleneck hypotheses as well as excessive total demand.
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