Resolved

It’s that time again.

Time to change those things we don’t like about ourselves in the annual ritual called New Year’s resolutions. Time to surrender to the allure of every January 1: a new year, a new beginning, potent with fresh-startism.

The compulsion to do a self-makeover is stronger on January 1 than any other time of the year (who ever heard of making resolutions on June 12?) Despite the fact that, as the popular aphorism goes, every day is the beginning of the rest of your life, a fresh start, and a second chance, January 1 is different – or seems so.

The hope and change euphoria of New Year’s resolutions does not admit that nine in ten of them will fail according to a survey conducted a couple of years ago, and most of those failures occur quickly – like within a month. So if one of your resolutions is to hit the gym and get the old bod in shape, my suggestion would be to buy the weekly or monthly plan, not the enticingly-priced annual plan which gives “two months of ‘free’ membership.” Those clever gym owner guys know that most of the people who sign up in January won’t be there at year-end; in fact most won’t be there after Valentine’s Day, which is why they price annual memberships so attractively.

I’ve belonged to two gym clubs at different times over the past 25 years and I always hated January. Workout times lengthened because oversold memberships overwhelmed the capacity of the machines. My only solace was knowing that I only had to put up with it for a month. Most of the new members would be gone by then and workout times would return to normal. The gym owners knew the same thing. Don’t buy more machines; just put up with old member complaints for a month and this too shall pass.

If we used a product that failed as often as New Year’s resolutions, we’d stop using it and we’d tell all of our friends to avoid it. But we are convinced there’s a difference with resolutions. When products fail it’s the product’s fault; when resolutions fail, it’s our fault. Not enough willpower, the old scold looking back from the mirror tells us. Maybe more positive affirmations pasted around the house and office would have helped.

But changing the person you are is not a rational process. It’s an emotional process. And emotions can’t be controlled by force of will alone, at least not for long. Still, the temptation to try harder is compelling, all the while ignoring that the psychological “muscle” of willpower is like any other muscle. Pushed to the limit by having to resist one temptation after another now forbidden by a new resolution, it ultimately fails. And when we pursue too many New Year’s resolutions, the willpower muscle fails sooner.

The only way to deal with limited willpower is to realize that willpower is limited. Sounds obvious but apparently it isn’t. We can’t make up for limited willpower by trying harder. Trying harder assumes more effort will create more willpower. At the same time we don’t want to be limited by our limited willpower. So, how do we keep something that’s limited from limiting us? We avoid relying on it as much as possible. One way to avoid relying on willpower is to distract our focus away from whatever takes willpower to resist.

In his well-known book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, author Daniel Goleman cites the children’s marshmallow experiment developed by Walter Mischel at Columbia University. It was suspected that a child’s ability to delay immediate gratification was a precursor to success in later life as an adult. Mischel created the experiment to test his hypothesis.

A marshmallow was placed in front of each child in a group arranged around a table with the assurance that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow, they would be given another when the researcher returned. The researcher didn’t reenter the room for 20 minutes – an eternity for a child staring down temptation – during which time the behavior of the children was observed through non-transparent glass.

Some children surrendered to temptation almost immediately, others held out until they no longer could, and still others succeeded in holding out until the researcher reentered the room with their reward. The group was tracked longitudinally into their adult careers and it was found that the children who had been able to delay gratification later got better SAT scores, had fewer problems controlling their weight, and tended to have more career success than those who couldn’t delay gratification. Goleman labeled the ability to delay gratification “emotional intelligence” and concluded it was a better predictor of adult success than IQ.

Goleman’s conclusion is controversial because it’s unclear if success in life correlates with the ability to delay gratification or is caused by it. Correlation and causality are quite different. If a farmer observes that his rooster crows when the sun comes up, he might conclude (incorrectly) that the crowing rooster causes the sunrise. In fact there is no causality; they correlate by happening at the same time. Roosters crow during daytime also.

What is often ignored in reciting the Mischel research is the behavior of the children who “delayed” gratification. Some sang to themselves, others fiddled with their clothing, and still others put their heads in their hands or on the table top. In other words, they distracted themselves from the marshmallow. Quite possibly their willpower was no stronger than any of the other children. But they had somehow learned to distract themselves to avoid burning up their willpower reserve. In school they likely used that same strategy to distract themselves from the temptation to play, so they studied more. In their careers they distracted their attention from disruptive temptations, allowing them to advance faster. Their success was due less to the ability to delay gratification than a simple and repeatable secret: when life serves dessert, look at the salad bowl.

In other words, the seemingly strong-willed children learned to avoid as much as possible putting their willpower to the test – a practice they carried into successful adulthoods.

So why do we put ourselves through the annual ritual of making New Year’s resolutions, knowing from past years that our willpower to keep them will fail? Isn’t doing the same thing and expecting different results the definition of insanity? I think the answer lies in the ritual of New Year’s resolution-making itself. It fires us up and inoculates us against what the late Zig Ziglar called “stinkin’ thinkin’” – i.e. doing something positive makes us feel positive, if only temporarily. We ignore past failure and hope for the best one more time, just as an alcoholic believes he can take one drink.

Am I suggesting that we should give up making New Year’s resolutions because they fail in large proportion and do so fast? No. Self-examination and making an effort to change ourselves is preferable to doing neither. And research has shown that people who formalize their goals as resolutions will be more likely to achieve them than people who have the same goals and motivation but don’t formally commit to them. The keys to New Year’s resolution success are moderation and method.

Let me explain.

Typical resolutions might be “lose 50 pounds by the end of the year,” (after all, that’s less than a pound a week, a paltry 3,500 calories, just 500 per day) or “read 25 books this year” (just two a month) or “exercise three hours a week” (good grief, with 112 average waking hours per week, surely three can be spared!) However, a pound a week, a book every other week, and less than 3% of weekly available time for exercise is a rational defense of the resolution’s ease. The resolution’s accomplishment, especially if it’s radical change, requires dealing with emotions – the feelings needed for natural action – because that is where the resistance will come from. We do things we like to do because our feelings work with us to act naturally. We avoid things we don’t like because our feelings work against us because we have to act unnaturally.

A compelling argument could be made for the ease with which 500 calories could be eliminated from our daily intake either by avoidance or substitution. Yet 37% of Americans are obese, and for some ethnic groups, it’s over 50%. Deprivation never feels good.

A Huffington Post poll taken in October indicated that 28% of Americans haven’t read a book in the past year. A Pew Research poll taken a year ago indicated that the median number of books read by readers last year was 6. (I was surprised it was that many.) Despite the arguable ease with which 25 books could be read in a year, it’s four times the median number read. To make time for reading, something must be given up that’s more fun than reading. If it weren’t, we’d be reading.

Exercise trainers say 30 minutes of walking five days per week and ten push-ups from the knees three times weekly is sufficient to maintain body tone and weight (if combined with calorie management) for most age groups. Few people could argue that these requirements are Spartan. Yet the CDC says 80% of adults fail to get the weekly recommended amount of exercise.

Don’t forget that the person who is urging you to eat less, read more, and exercise is the same person who has a natural dislike for diets, reading, and exercise – a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the same skin. Good luck with that.

I’ve written previously in this blog that ObamaCare will fail primarily because it attempts too much change. A more sensible strategy would have been to string together lots of little changes which collectively would have amounted to major change. It would have taken longer, but it would have converted a sure failure into a possible success. Alas, that isn’t the political way. But it’s the way we achieve successful change in business – lots of little changes, a few at a time.

The same approach should be applied to New Year’s resolutions to improve their success. Don’t make a dozen resolutions. One or two is enough; more than three is too many. The object is to move the ball. In time, you’ll cross the goal line.

If you resolve to exercise five minutes a day, you’re more likely to do it than resolving to exercise 50 minutes, and you may find that once started you’ll not stop at five and may go for 50 minutes. But every day, regardless of how much or how little you walked the previous day, resolve to walk only five minutes.

Instead of resolving to read 25 books this year, resolve to read about 18 pages every day. Even the slowest readers can achieve that number in about 15 to 20 minutes. If you want, read half of the pages in the morning and half in the evening. But every day, regardless of how much or how little was read the previous day, resolve to read only 18 pages. Over the period of a year that will get you through about 25 books. But never think about 25 books. Think only about 18 pages. Cut this quota in half and you’ll still read twice the books read at the national median.

Most authors don’t sit down to write all day. While output varies from author to author, most resolve to accomplish a less frightening goal – like writing 500 words and hanging it up for the day. Books average 100,000 words, and at that pace the author produces a book in about 200 days – or, with weekends off, a book in ten months! Move the ball 500 words at a time and a book is produced every year.

Former wide receiver and now football commentator Cris Carter struggled with drugs and alcohol while he was with the Philadelphia Eagles until head coach Buddy Ryan cut him because of his addictions. The Minnesota Vikings claimed Carter off waiver in September 1990 for a $100 fee. He was a good player if he could conquer his substance abuse, so the Vikings management immediately put him in rehab. The team substance abuse counselor, Betty Triliegi, challenged Carter to go one week without drinking. Just one week. That challenge was made on September 19, 1990, and Carter has been sober since – one week at a time.

The Iditarod Race is a grueling 1,100 mile-long test of dogs and mushers through an Artic area beset by blizzards and temperatures that can fluctuate between 40 degrees above to 60 below zero. The musher and dogs go all day and rest at night or go all night and rest during the day – about 12 hours on and 12 off for the eight to ten day race. That is, until Susan Butcher came along. She changed the way the Iditarod is run today by introducing the four to six hour work-rest cycle. The dogs became less tired before they were rested and recovered their stamina quicker. Butcher’s short sprints were initially pooh-poohed by Iditarod vets (all men) who believed in “go for broke” daily goals before Butcher’s short cycle technique won four out of five consecutive races, proving small is better.

The lesson to be learned here is that New Year’s resolutions are more likely to be successful if they are few in number and they focus on process rather than outcomes. Like the children and the marshmallows, a focus on process distracts attention from the ultimate and often intimidating goal. And short cycles of process – 30 minutes here, five minutes there – are less likely to be resisted and combatted by procrastination or creative avoidance.

Plodding along in short process cycles will more often succeed in achieving the desired outcome than heroic long cycles because life by the inch is a cinch; life by the yard is hard.

So go ahead and make your New Year’s resolutions, and this year may the Force of good technique be with you!

“He was despised and rejected …”

There are several things that make the Christmas of 1981 memorable in my mind. It was my youngest child’s second Christmas but the first that he was able to comprehend in some sense. One of our favorite Christmas photos is of him staring transfixed at the Christmas tree lights and decorations. After several accidents, his mother had told him he could look but not touch.

A second thing making that Christmas memorable was my dad turning 70 several weeks before it. His age seemed ancient to me at the time, but not so ancient today since I passed it a few years ago. My dad was nine months younger than Ronald Reagan almost to the day. The Reagan years had just begun and with each of my dad’s later birthdays I would remind him that he was now old enough to be President.

The third thing that makes the Christmas of 1981 memorable to me was happening in the country that gave the world Nicolaus Copernicus, Fryderyk Chopin (one of my favorite composers), Marie Curie-Sklodowska, John Paul II (in his fourth year as Pope), and Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement which ultimately brought about the collapse of communism – although at the time there was no way of knowing that would be the outcome.

The Solidarity movement had been giving Moscow heartburn and the Russian overlords decided to replace Poland’s nominal leader, Stanislaw Kania, whom they thought was too soft, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski whose reputation for repression was reminiscent of Poland’s long history of foreign occupation and domination. Predictably, Jaruzelski struck like the villainous dictator he was and established harsh martial law to crush Solidarity. Strikes swept the country, many unionists were killed, Solidarity leaders were arrested and jailed, and only starvation brought the surrender of the last holdouts deep in the coal mines. It seemed to me that the world was moving toward another Cold War confrontation with the paranoid leadership of the Soviet Union.

Reagan was completing his first year in the White House and was still something of an unknown quantity. His love of freedom and hatred of communism were well-known, however, and there was little doubt that he would do something. One of his advisers later noted that Reagan was “livid” about the Polish situation. Moreover, the world’s political leaders, Pope John Paul, NATO, and activists outside of the Iron Curtain had united to denounce Jaruzelski’s crackdown.

On December 19, 1981, Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski, once an enthusiastic communist, notified the State Department that he was defecting and requested asylum. The next day he announced his defection in a radio message to the world saying he had acted to show support for Solidarity and Lech Walesa. "The cruel night of darkness and silence was spread over my country," he said. Reagan invited him to the White House for a private meeting on December 22 during which Spasowski asked Reagan if he would light a candle and put it in a White House window to show support for the people of Poland. Reagan did just that with his own hands as Spasowski and his wife watched and wept.

During the evening of December 23, as my family readied for Christmas, Reagan went on television to give his Christmas message to the nation and to address the worsening situation in Poland. I was able to find the text of his speech which I’ve edited in the following paragraphs. It is a memorable commentary that, for a society already secularized 32 years ago, Reagan felt comfortable to speak of the spirit of Christmas in such religious terms.

Good evening.

At Christmas time, every home takes on a special beauty, a special warmth, and that's certainly true of the White House, where so many famous Americans have spent their Christmases over the years. This fine old home, the people's house, has seen so much, been so much a part of all our lives and history. It's been humbling and inspiring for Nancy and me to be spending our first Christmas in this place.

We've lived here as your tenants for almost a year now, and what a year it's been. As a people we've been through quite a lot—moments of joy, of tragedy, and of real achievement—moments that I believe have brought us all closer together. G. K. Chesterton once said that the world would never starve for wonders, but only for the want of wonder.

At this special time of year, we all renew our sense of wonder in recalling the story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem, nearly 2,000 years ago.

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace. Yes, we've questioned why he who could perform miracles chose to come among us as a helpless babe, but maybe that was his first miracle, his first great lesson that we should learn to care for one another.

Tonight, in millions of American homes, the glow of the Christmas tree is a reflection of the love Jesus taught us. Like the shepherds and wise men of that first Christmas, we Americans have always tried to follow a higher light, a star, if you will. At lonely campfire vigils along the frontier, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, through war and peace, the twin beacons of faith and freedom have brightened the American sky. At times our footsteps may have faltered, but trusting in God's help, we've never lost our way.

Just across the way from the White House stand the two great emblems of the holiday season: a Menorah, symbolizing the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and the National Christmas Tree, a beautiful towering blue spruce from Pennsylvania. Like the National Christmas Tree, our country is a living, growing thing planted in rich American soil. Only our devoted care can bring it to full flower. So, let this holiday season be for us a time of rededication.

Even as we rejoice, however, let us remember that for some Americans, this will not be as happy a Christmas as it should be. I know a little of what they feel. I remember one Christmas Eve during the Great Depression, my father opening what he thought was a Christmas greeting. It was a notice that he no longer had a job.

A few months before he took up residence in this house, one of my predecessors, John Kennedy, tried to sum up the temper of the times with a quote from an author closely tied to Christmas, Charles Dickens. We were living, he said, in the best of times and the worst of times. Well, in some ways that's even more true today. The world is full of peril, as well as promise. Too many of its people, even now, live in the shadow of want and tyranny.

As I speak to you tonight, the fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance. For a thousand years, Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.

The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders are imprisoned, their fate unknown. Factories, mines, universities, and homes have been assaulted.

The target of this [repression] is the Solidarity Movement, but in attacking Solidarity its enemies attack an entire people. Ten million of Poland's 36 million citizens are members of Solidarity. Taken together with their families, they account for the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. By persecuting Solidarity the Polish Government wages war against its own people.

I urge the Polish Government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.

Yesterday, I met in this very room with Romuald Spasowski, the distinguished former Polish Ambassador who has sought asylum in our country in protest of the suppression of his native land. He told me that one of the ways the Polish people have demonstrated their solidarity in the face of martial law is by placing lighted candles in their windows to show that the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.

Ambassador Spasowski requested that on Christmas Eve a lighted candle will burn in the White House window as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people. I urge all of you to do the same tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we're taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles.

Once, earlier in this century, an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world. Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished. We are blessed with a freedom and abundance denied to so many. Let those candles remind us that these blessings bring with them a solid obligation, an obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers and an obligation to the children of the world, whose future will be shaped by the way we live our lives today.

Christmas means so much because of one special child. But Christmas also reminds us that all children are special, that they are gifts from God, gifts beyond price that mean more than any presents money can buy. In their love and laughter, in our hopes for their future lies the true meaning of Christmas.

So, in a spirit of gratitude for what we've been able to achieve together over the past year and looking forward to all that we hope to achieve together in the years ahead, Nancy and I want to wish you all the best of holiday seasons. As Charles Dickens, whom I quoted a few moments ago, said so well in "A Christmas Carol," "God bless us, every one."

As Reagan spoke I looked at my small children aged 2, 4, and 6 scattered about on the floor, eyeing the tree across the room already surrounded by gifts as their mother wrapped more. I couldn’t help but see the contradiction in my circumstances with those living six time zones east in Poland. We put a candle in our front window that night for the people of Poland.

I wondered then and continue to wonder today why Americans don’t get on their knees every day to thank God who for whatever reason – certainly not for deserving it – has blessed this country so much among the nations of the world.

I wonder if any public official today would use the terms Reagan used so openly above to talk about the “first Christmas in Bethlehem” two millennia ago, the “divinity of the child born,” who could perform miracles, who “chose to come among us as a helpless babe,” and that “Christmas means so much because of one special child”?

The world into which Jesus was born was under the boot of the Roman Empire whose cruelty would make Nazism pale in comparison. Prophets had foretold his coming for over a thousand years:

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government.

It is an extravagant promise, don’t you think?

Yet, in the 32 years since Reagan gave his sunny address on the meaning of Christmas in a world about to explode, the secular elites have done their best to drive Christ out of Christmas. If Christmas weren’t already a holiday, they would prevent its becoming one. A crèche is now a desecration of the public square. When I was a child in public school, we began every day’s class with a Bible reading by the teacher and a prayer. The secular elites have ended that practice with a perversion of the First Amendment, using the State to bar religion instead of barring the State from sponsoring a religion. But that’s precisely what secular elitism is – a religion. Except that its religion tolerates no character claiming to be God, Prince of Peace, or the creator of a government that will increase without end.

Secular elitism rejects such outlandish claims. But that rejection was also foretold by prophets more than a thousand years before the miraculous birth in Bethlehem.

For He grew up … like a tender shoot, like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.

God knew He would be rejected by the world. But He came anyway.

Why?

Because if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God carried a wallet, your picture would be in it. Your birthday would be circled if God kept a calendar. And if God lived in a house, one of its rooms would be specifically designated as yours.

No matter what we think of God, that’s what He thinks of us.

Merry Christmas!

Obama Finds His Inner Elizabeth Warren

After the disastrous rollout of his ObamaCare website and the sticker shock sweeping in behind millions of private insurance policy cancelations, Obama promised to make his signature healthcare law the focus of the remainder of his second term. That lasted for 3½ minutes. Sagging poll numbers compelled him to shift to another focus. So last week he gave a predictable speech decrying income inequality. The audience was the Washington DC liberal think tank, The Center for American Progress, and he promised that would become his focus for the remainder of his second term.

If we Google the key words “Obama” and “focus” we find that over the years Obey’s “focus” has variously been jobs, women’s issues, wars, climate, energy, the Middle East – you name it. Lots of focusing and refocusing means no focusing because in truth Obama has the attention span of an amoeba.

Several newly-released polls show that almost 60% of adults disapprove of Obama’s job performance. Each negative poll shifts his focus du jour to another red herring issue tout de suite in order to distract the voting public from the crummy job he is doing as president. Oui? This latest refocus is a patent attempt to deflect the media and public attention away from the ObamaCare disaster.

The choice of income inequality as the latest Obama focus is ironic. Abraham Lincoln said, “God must love the common man, he made so many of them.” Obama and his Democrat buddies essentially paraphrase that: “We liberals must love the poor people because our policies create so many of them.”

"I take this personally," Obama harrumphed in his inequality speech, pointing out that members of his family have benefited from government programs. He must have been referring to his alcoholic uncle who is in this country illegally because Obama and Michelle have had every door opened, every privilege extended, and every preference given, allowing both Obamas to partake of the best education the country offers and benefit from the most influential political connections the liberal establishment could lay at their feet as they ascended to the heights of Olympus.

Calling rising income inequality "the defining challenge of our time" is laughable coming from Obama’s lips. More than any other modern president, he has used his office to live like an imperial monarch while pushing an inequality-inducing agenda that has crushed the median income, produced an anemic recovery, and given the Federal Reserve justification to rejigger monetary policy to drive up house and stock prices. Obviously, those who owned houses and stocks benefitted – not because of greed or exploitation but because of government policy.

What hypocrisy to blame private enterprise, markets, and technology entrepreneurship instead of government for the gap in incomes from top to bottom! Might the gap reflect a gap in skills, experience, and knowledge? Might the gap reflect a gap in the value one’s work contributes to an economic society? The term “income inequality” implies there ought instead to be income equality. What does that mean? Obama’s CAP speech reveals a man who believes the American economic system should provide everyone equal economic outcomes. Those on the Right believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes measured as equal incomes and wealth.

It is Obama and his liberal scourge that have stonewalled school vouchers for inner-city kids and protected education unions from accountability for the sorry state of public education. It is Obama and his congressional protectors who can’t connect the high corporate tax and business regulation dots to the weakest post-recession recovery in history dots. It was Obama and his union minions who were quick to pick winners and losers in the stimulus bailouts rather than let the market decide who was “too big to fail.” It was Obama, Reid, and Pelosi who peddled their nauseous “fair share” rhetoric to justify playing Robin Hood in the redistribution of wealth as if government were engaged in anything other than outright theft. We can thank Obama and the ancestry of liberalism he mentioned in his speech for the generations of welfare recipients who have unwittingly become residents on the government plantation, dependent on the “big house” as surely as if society’s clock had been turned back 150 years.

So, what does Obama propose to solve “income inequality”? Easing the rules on union organizing. More stimulus spending (translated union spending.) An increase in the minimum wage – from $7.25 to $10.10. Along side that he wants an increase in the wage floor for workers whose incomes are mostly tips, which can average up to $20 an hour, but the tip income would not be counted in tripling their “minimum wage.” He wants a Paycheck Fairness Act which would make the government the referee in paying men and women equally for similar work. The government will define “similar.” He wants to extend unemployment benefits another 99 weeks (a new incentive to get the unemployed to look for work.) He wants an Employment Non-Discrimination Act which would give government new powers to interpret bias against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender hiring. The government will define “bias.”

On top of this grab bag of new government rights and raises is the calamitous ObamaCare which will raise the cost of hiring everyone, but it will be especially felt by small businesses which are most sensitive to labor expense. Sane thinking would start by trying to solve that problem. Instead Obama’s health law will make it worse.

While he avoided an explicit accusation, the Obama CAP speech left little doubt that the “income inequality” problem is caused by a small group of greedy people at the top of the economic pile who spend every waking moment trying to keep everyone else at the bottom of the pile. Obama’s speech solution translates into two remedies – (i) give everyone on the bottom of the pile a raise by government fiat and (ii) transfer the ill-gotten gains of the rich (the makers) to the “have nots (the takers.)

I’m not making this up. Here’s what he had to say. “The top 10% no longer takes in one-third of our income, it now takes in half.” Note the use of the verb “take.” “Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more,” he further whined. “And meanwhile, a family in the top 1% has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.” (And Obama knows how to find those people when he’s raising money for his never-ending campaigning.) Of course, he denied that he was promoting equality of result. But he made clear his belief that wealth and income differences are unfair and government policy should eliminate them. That sure sounds like a complaint about the inequality of results.

Well, let’s look at the facts, which fortuitously were released by the CBO this past week. The top 40% of households in a rank order of pretax income actually paid 106.2% of the 2010 income taxes, the latest year of data available. “How can any group pay more than 100%?” you ask. Short answer: because a large group of wage earners “pays” negative taxes – i.e. they pay no taxes AND they qualify to get money from the government. Household incomes in the bottom 40% of the rank order paid no tax and received $18,950 in government transfers in 2010 so says the CBO.

The top 20% of households ranked by pretax income PAID 92.9% of taxes in 2010. The next 20% down the rank order PAID 13.3%. Add those two together and the top 40% PAID 106.2% of the government’s net tax income. The next 20% down the rank order PAID 2.9%, bringing the total PAID by the top 60% to 109.1%.

Then we get to the next 20% down the rank order of household incomes. They PAID -2.9%. The bottom 20% PAID -6.2%

Add those percentages up and they net to 100% even in Palm Beach County FL. It should be pretty clear that the makers are paying and the takers aren’t – their “taxes” are incomes.

I never thought anyone could get to the left of Elizabeth Warren. But Obama’s CAP speech sure did it. Rather than the socialist agenda he promoted, conservatives have better ideas for creating a better society. To solve a problem, one should start with what causes it. It’s apparent that at least 40% of households make too little money to enjoy the lifestyle of the 60% above them in the rank order of pretax incomes. Is that because the top 60% are keeping them down? Only Obama and his liberal ideologues believe that hogwash. “It’s the economy, Stupid!” Isn’t that the advice James Carville gave candidate Bill Clinton to run against Bush 41? This economy is incompetently managed. All of the White House breast-beating that accompanied last week’s jobs report that the economy had added 203,000 last month – better than expected – totally ignored that there are still four million less people in the full-time workforce than were there before the Great Recession. Each year more people reach workforce age and the jobs aren’t there because of Obama’s anti-growth policies.

Inequality is bad when it’s caused by crony capitalism – wealth created by favors from government. Solyndra and other friends of Obama’s come to mind. Inequality is bad when government policy provides incentives that compete with hard work, when it protects constituencies from better alternatives (union, schools), and when it produces an underclass (entitlements.) Inequality is good when it provides role models like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett, when it provides proof that the American system of innovation and markets rewards companies like Intel and Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Inequality doesn’t hurt our economy. Wrong-headed government policies do. That would include the no-interest Fed policies that produced the recent stock market boom, much to the cheers of the Obama White House whose resident now has the gall to vilify the people who benefitted from it. That would include ObamaCare, which is hated by the majority of the American public who suspect healthcare quality will decline because of it.

Last week the death of Nelson Mandela was “honored” by politicians around the world. Mandela would have abhorred the encomiums. He was a modest man who forbade photos of him after he was released from prison. The only image of him was taken illegally and released after his death by the South African government. In the grieving audience were Obama, British PM David Cameron, and Denmark’s PM Helle Thorning-Schnidt. Putting their best face forward for the occasion, they took a “selfie” like teeny-boppers cuddling their heads while Michelle fumed. Only God knows what transpired between the Nation’s representative to the world and his wife as they deplaned from Air Force One after the Mandela memorial. I’m glad I wasn’t there to hear it.

But Obama’s self-absorption brought this thought to mind. Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of his most complex plays. Among other faults, Lear could not separate his roles of king, father, and friend. As the providentially-endowed steward of the realm, his kingship absorbed all of his other roles. He was king of the realm, king of his family, and king of his friends. Ultimately he lost everything and became mad. In the end he discovers his true self, recovers his sanity, rises above treachery, and is restored his kingship in a proper perspective. When Lear dies, Shakespeare called him "every inch a King" but he was also every inch a man as well.

Obama is our president, not our king, and he is the steward of the Republic. I wonder if it will ever be said of him that he was “every inch a President” – or every inch a man?

The Folly of a “Minimum” Wage

An obscure election last month in the small city of SeaTac surrounding the Seattle airport was little noticed in the national press. SeaTac is a mostly poor community of 27,000 whose economic engine is the airport that employs most of them. The cause for notice was SeaTac‘s November ballot initiative, Proposition 1. It would raise the minimum wage to $15 – 63% higher than the $9.19 minimum wage for Washington, already the highest of any state in the union. The jobs affected will be those in the airport and surrounding transportation and hospitality businesses.

Only 6,000 total votes were cast in the Prop 1 initiative and it passed by only 77 votes. The campaign for and against it was expensive, costing businesses and unions over $300 per vote cast. The losers, the business coalition, are calling for a hand recount so the outcome won’t be known until next week.

But will the SeaTac businesses be the losers in the end?

There is ample research to show that increases in the minimum wage by force of law rather than the force of the market always costs jobs. Job losses don’t happen immediately. Maybe that’s why those who believe they can defy economic law by willing it keep trying.

Setting a wage rate floor is simply price-fixing in a different disguise. Suppose your favorite restaurant raised its prices 63% across the board. Most likely you’d dine at a different restaurant. When gasoline prices rose to record levels last year, what did people do? They car-pooled, they substituted public transportation, they telecommuted from home. Gasoline inventories piled up forcing down the price. How is that any different than raising labor prices – labor that is no more productive after increasing its cost than it was before?

The laws of supply and demand are not voluntary. They weren’t established by ballot initiative or enacted by government. All of the cork-popping heard after the Prop 1 vote count came in will ultimately go for naught. The affected SeaTac businesses will not swallow higher labor costs and continue doing business as they were, which the Prop 1 advocates seem to think will happen. Some will relocate, as they threatened to do. Restaurants will replace wait staff with self-service buffets. Car rental customers will do more things for themselves which attendants once did for them. And automation will replace jobs. Service levels will go down, and prices will go up.

The concept of a “just wage” – advocated by the Prop 1 supporters – is rooted in the Middle Ages when wages and justice were affairs of the church before modern economies dictated prices and wages. But supporters of non-market mandates have continued to defy the will of the market. Australia experimented with minimum wage-setting in the late 1800s and couldn’t make it work. American wage reformers tried to impose their will on the market as early as 1912. But the US Supreme Court kept getting in their way by declaring unconstitutional any attempts to interfere with free bargaining by employers and workers for wages. Not until the socialistic New Deal passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was a federal minimum wage legalized by Roosevelt’s newly “packed’ Supreme Court. It reversed its previous rulings and upheld the minimum wage, deciding it was within Congress’ Commerce Clause rights. Go figure.

The Roosevelt minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. It was raised several times, the last change putting it at $7.25 an hour in July 2009. Minimum wage increases are always a battle to push through Congress, so in 2010 Congress gave states and municipalities the power to set their own minimum wages above the federal level, which the District of Columbia and 19 states have done. In his last State of the Union speech early this year, Obama made his customary appeal to Congress to raise the federal minimum wage almost 25% to $9, arguing that “No one who works full time should have to live in poverty.” Well, Obey, almost no one does.

But let’s take Obey a step further. If prosperity can be achieved by mandating it, why not raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour or $35? Any right-thinking person knows markets don’t obey mandates, Obey.

Setting a minimum wage has been the liberals dream since Roosevelt. The fact that it assumes employers won’t react and ignoring the damage it does to jobs never enters the liberal’s calculus. In 1950 only half the jobs were affected by the federal minimum wage. Blacks and whites were employed in equal percentage and teen unemployment was not a problem. Today virtually all jobs are subject to minimum wage limitations. Teenagers – the least skilled part of the workforce – are the most unemployed. The jobs they once performed – pumping gasoline at service stations, for example – have been replaced by self-service because of minimum wages. Go to a fast food restaurant and you’re handed a cup to serve yourself at the beverage machine, something an employee once did. I bagged groceries as a kid and carried them to the shopper’s car. Today, you’ll check-out your own groceries, bag them, and carry them to your car.

Minimum wages discriminate against teenagers because they lack skills and experience. But minimum wages discriminate against black teens most because they are even less skilled and less experienced than white teens. It’s not racism. Black teens are more likely to live in broken homes with poor role models. And absent parental support, they benefit less from public education, which is terrible on its own. Not surprisingly, then, the white teen unemployment rate is 21% and black teen unemployment is almost twice that – 37%. Laws that discriminate against low skilled workers, therefore, fall heaviest on blacks and Obama wants to increase that burden. Even if low skilled workers are willing to accept less pay, the minimum wage laws prevent it. There ought to be a law against the law!

The adverse impact of a minimum wage isn’t just economic. There’s more benefit in an entry level job than the money earned. Entry level employment introduces young people to the world of work. It teaches responsibility – and consequences. It teaches work habits, respect for authority, and that hard work usually earns rewards. Kids from broken homes with deficient education would benefit most from these experiences, but minimum wage laws discriminate against them.

Moreover, the belief that a minimum wage should allow their earners to support families and avoid poverty is fundamentally flawed. The wages paid to fast food workers, retail employees, and many other businesses whose business model operates on razor thin margins rely on a low-cost part-time workforce. Many jobs are seasonal. This is done to keep costs down and pass low prices to consumers. They were never intended to provide the financial support for a family. These jobs were designed to supplement a principal income – not to be a principal income.

Not fair? Fairness has nothing to do with it. That’s the business model and every competitor follows it. Should government outlaw business models?

So, are great numbers of economic slaves toiling away on the abyss of poverty to enrich their capitalistic overlords as advocates of the minimum wage would have us believe?

The national workforce which reports a minimum wage income to the IRS is under 3%. Of those people less than one in four are in their prime working years of 20 to 64 and less than a fourth of those people live below the poverty line. For the benefit of those who vote in Palm Beach County FL let me explain that that’s one-sixteenth of less than 3% – i.e. less than two-tenths of 1%. That doesn’t sound like a national disaster to me.

The rest are teens – half of the minimum wage workforce – who are primarily supported by their family income, and the over-65s – about one in four – who work to supplement retirement and Social Security or work simply to get out of their house a few hours a week.

We don’t know how many of those who earn minimum wages in the prime working years are between jobs that pay more than minimum wages. But we do know that the stereotypical single parent working full time at minimum wage to support a family is fallacious. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports only one in 25 minimum wage earners fit that stereotype, and those people are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit which raises their effective income well above the minimum wage. They are not living on the edge of economic destitution.

Hmm, if the minimum wage workforce is tiny and the portion of it fitting the single-parent-supporting-a-family stereotype is microscopic, and if raising the minimum wage primarily denies work to people not qualified to perform jobs paying the minimum wage, why do politicians keep raising the minimum wage?

I can think of a few reasons and I’m sure readers can think of more.

First, understand that the most common elements drifting around in the universal ether are hydrogen and stupidity. Those who advocate for raising the minimal wage would quickly admit that increases in the price of beer, cars, eating out, and electricity would reduce the consumption of beer, cars, eating out, and electricity. In fact, increased taxes on tobacco reduced consumption in half in less than three decades. But the same people freely park their wits at the door while convincing themselves that raising the cost of cheap labor won’t affect its consumption by employers.

New Jersey, renown for it high taxes, saw businesses and residents flee the state for years until Republican Chris Christie was elected governor and fought unions and legislators to make the state competitive with surrounding venues. The NJ politicians learned nothing from the experience. Christie denounced their recent proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.25. Nevertheless, the state legislature passed the increase by a margin of 61%.

Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $9.80 over two years – an increase of more than 35%. Obama, always undeterred by facts, wants Congress to raise the minimum wage by 23% immediately. This seems to prove the assertion that an ounce of a politician’s brains costs ten times more than an ounce from anyone else because ten times more politicians are needed to get an ounce of brain. Minimum wage laws are politically feel-good regulations. It never occurs to politicians to get proof that they are solving the problem they are trying to solve – something routinely done in business and science.

Second, the argument for a minimum wage is couched in the tired bromide of a moral wage. Wages are dictated by economics, not morality. However moral it might be to argue that Joe Blow should be paid $10 an hour because he deserves it, if his work produces $5 an hour in value that’s not morality. It’s stupidity. Morality can’t be legislated. If morality was the basis of politics there would be no politicians.

Politicians decry the outsourcing of work to other countries, allegedly exploiting a foreign workforce to build $500 flat screen TVs that would cost $1,500 if made with American labor. So here’s a question: ask American consumers if they’d like to pay a $1,000 “morality tax” to have TVs made in this country. I don’t think so.

Which brings me to the third reason politicians press to raise the minimum wage: unions. Unions are struggling to stay relevant while membership sinks to historic lows. Local ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, such as was done in SeaTac with Prop 1, may increase union membership and raise union wages.

Here’s how.

Many union contracts specify wages that are multiples of the minimum wage. If the minimum wage goes up, union wages go up. Democrats are the beneficiaries of union political contributions, so Democrats are the chief sponsors for wage increases.

The Prop 1 initiative was architected by the union and heavily promoted by union advertising, which outspent the business coalition three to one. Because it wrote the initiative, the union inserted a provision in it which requires paid sick leave, makes part-time work difficult, prohibits sharing of tips, etc. These provisions can be waived in a union contract, but businesses that aren’t unionized must comply with them. Obviously this puts non-union businesses at a disadvantage, which is an incentive to allow their workforce to unionize.

In Long Beach CA a similar initiative was on the ballot which required hotels with more than 100 rooms to pay a $13 minimum wage and sick leave. Two Hyatt hotels caved and were unionized. However, some hotels closed rooms to have only 99 available for rent and laid off workers. The remaining workers were paid $13 an hour but had their hours cut.

It’s too early to tell if SeaTac and Long Beach are new strategies for unionizing using the minimum wage as a battering ram. The effort may fail if businesses react smartly to offset the damage. Unfortunately, the local community will lose either way. It becomes a less attractive location for new business. And its unemployment rate will rise.

This past week, Obama’s favorite union, the Service Employees International Union, orchestrated demonstrations in 100 cities outside of fast food restaurants calling for doubling their hourly wages to $15 – twice the minimum wage – or face a nationwide strike. (Yes, SEIU was behind Prop 1 too.) Young fast food workers were interviewed by eager reporters. The workers’ complaints were predictable: they “deserved” to be paid $15 an hour or at least $10 for their work. Really? There’s no one forcing you young folks to work at McDonald’s or Arby’s or Burger King. So leave. Get yourself a job paying the $10 or $15 an hour that you say you’re worth.

Uh? … not qualified for jobs paying that much, you say? I thought as much. Too bad you don’t.