We have become a country of "One Rungers". Sounds bad and it is. Every day, I get a little closer to figuring this all out. I think that if I keep connecting the "Dots" that eventually I will have the clear picture. Remember the old puzzles where you used to connect the dots to figure out what the picture was? Well, the concept still works. You are probably wondering, just what is a "One Runger"? Before I get to that, I would like to tell a short story.
When I was a kid, I used to pick cotton along side of my father. He was a dust bowel and depression Okie, but he knew something about the "ladder of life". He knew that when we were both picking cotton that we were on the bottom "rung" of that ladder and to get ahead, we needed to figure out how to get to higher rungs on that ladder. He just worried about one rung at a time and he was able to climb that "ladder of life" until when he died, he had a net worth of several million dollars. I understood the concept of the "ladder of life" at an early age too and have one just like my father and climbed that ladder, one rung at a time. Having shoes to wear to school was just one more rung on that ladder. Now why is this story so important? Here is why.
When I was in graduate school, I studied economic systems optimization. Sounds like a big deal, but like most things, it was simple. The idea was to study systems and see how they could be optimized. That is go have the system produce as much as possible and at the lowest cost. When you look at the United States, that means that we are operating at our optimum when every individual is operating at their maximum potential. It is like a horse race where the idea is to get 10 horses over the finish line in the least amount of total time. The total time is the total of each horse's time all added together. In most horse races, that is exactly what happens. The race tends to be optimum. This all happens because there are rewards for the horses based on their finish times. The fastest horse gets more than the last horse, but they all get something. The last horse does not end up as dog food. It is a simple concept isn't? Now how does the "One Rung" thing come into this?
What we have with most of the people now in the United States is a bunch of "One Rungers". These are people who get on the first rung and just stay their. They don't seem to want to try to climb higher. If they have the basic ability to get to a higher rung and chose not to, it clearly sub optimizes the economic system. Follow me on that? Now it is even worse. If they just stayed on the first rung, that would be bad enough, but they want to get more pay for keeping on doing the same thing over and over. When I picked cotton, we got paid by the pound, so the more we picked, the more we got paid. We were still on the bottom rung, but we were getting a little higher. Labor unions are at the core of this problem. By forming a union and getting all their buddies to attempt to bankrupt the company, they can get paid more while staying one the "One Rung" and not producing any more. Notice than almost any job that can be done outside the United States has left and now we are left with only things that are more difficult to ship out. Medical and government workers are about the last big groups left. Home building held on for a while with big government incentives, but it finally collapsed too.
What we have to do is to figure out how we are going to get people to start trying to climb that ladder of life again. We used to have a lot of new immigrants who came here to climb that ladder, but no more. What we have now are mostly free loaders who want to be "One Rungers". School teachers at all levels are perfect examples of "One Rungers". Notice how unions have helped them. A teacher who started teaching a class o 25 2nd graders for $30,000 per year now wants to be paid much more for doing exactly the same thing. To try to justify this whole thing, the unions have created rules that require a raise if the 2nd grade teacher takes some extra credit class in the summer, yet they still teach the same 25 2nd graders. They even go one better and try to get the class size down to 20 kids and still get paid the same or more. Where is the logic in this? If I picked the cotton with just my left hand, should I get paid more per pound? This is what we are talking about.
I could go on with kids 20 years old who get truck driving jobs for the county or state and 20 years later they are still truck drivers, but what to be paid more just because they have gotten older. They still have to drive the speed limit, so where is the greater productivity?
What we have to do is to figure out how to penalize people who sit on "One Rung" when they are capable of climbing higher. Rewards help, but we can't reward people for staying on the same rung all their lives. To compete in the world, we have to try to "Optimize" our economic system and that means getting rid of "One Rungers".
