In his messages to Congress and in his budget, Jimmy Carter has just set forth his economic policy for 1978. He hopes that it will prove to the country that his grasp of fiscal reality is firmer than it sometimes appears. Says Senior Editor George Church, who wrote this week's cover story: "Carter's severe problem is that he has convinced most of the business community that he doesn't know what he's doing."

When it comes to business, Church knows what he is doing. He has been writing about the economy for 23 years. While working as a copy boy at the New York Times, he learned that the Wall Street Journal was hiring people without extensive economics backgrounds, and he applied for a job. Says Church: "To my surprise, I was hired, and to my even greater surprise, I found that I was actually interested in business." After 14 years at the Journal, he joined TIME in 1969, and has since been writing and editing in our Business section.

"Writing about business is an acquired taste," Church admits. "The technical terms and the jargon can be terrifying, of course, but economic events do proceed by a certain logic. Jobs, prices, taxes: those are the subjects everyone cares about. and they are certainly what this week's story is about."

Church drew upon reporting from Washington Correspondent William Blaylock, who interviewed some two dozen experts on the current state of the economy, and Economic Correspondent George Taber, who interviewed Administration policymakers. Taber also compiled background on Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal and found that "it's impossible to spend more than five minutes around the man and not call him Mike. Mr. Secretary just wouldn't sound right." In addition to conducting interviews at the Treasury, Taber spent some time in Blumenthal's limousine, chatting with the Secretary as he went from one meeting to another. In the course of those drives, Taber learned that in Secret Service lingo, Blumenthal is known as "Fencing Master," and the Treasury as "Castle." "Besides talking freely about his economic views, Blumenthal obviously enjoyed recalling his early years, telling tales about working as a casino shill and a lighting man for a strip show in Nevada," says Taber. "After stories like that, it was difficult to turn the interview back to questions about the capital gains tax."

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