Every few months a city council decides to substantially increase the minimum wage in their city only to have economics provide a reality check. The last time I wrote about this, the focus was on the Seattle, Washington City Council. This time the economic lesson took place on the other side of the country in Portland, Maine.

On January 1, the minimum wage in Portland spiked to $19.50 from $13. To put this in perspective, this was five dollars higher than in the other Portland (that would be Portland, Oregon). The reason for the dramatic increase in the minimum wage goes back to a ballot referendum that would raise the minimum wage in stages.

The referendum stipulated that if Portland were under an emergency proclamation, the hazard-pay multiplier would go into effect. That multiplier was 1.5 times the minimum wage. But the City Council didn’t lift the state of emergency before New Year’s Eve. The minimum wage jumped on January 1.

The owner of a fitness business told the City Council that her business was down 50 percent since the pandemic hit. This minimum wage hike would have required her to lay off all her employees, including her manager. She would have to work all the hours by herself because she doesn’t get paid.

The owner of a coffee shop testified that this minimum wage hike would force her to leave Portland. She used her 2019 profits to ensure her employees got a raise even though her business plummeted during the pandemic. She couldn’t guarantee their jobs if the hazard pay remained in effect.

You may have noticed my use of the word “if.” Fortunately, the Portland City Council heard these testimonies and lifted the state of emergency. Chalk this up to one more city council that learned a lesson in economics.

Many religious leaders from various denominations have spoken out against what could be called “woke theology.” Earlier this month Archbishop José Gomez added his concern. As the leader of the Archdiocese in Los Angeles, he wanted to step forward to educate others.

He is concerned that the “space that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking” due to wokeism. He has noticed how “Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed.” He added that is also true in so many other sectors like education, health care, and government.

The woke religion, he says, rejects the salvation of Christ for the salvation found in racial tension and class struggle. He laments that these ideas have not only overtaken the universities, corporations, and the media, but are also found within Catholic and Protestant churches.

He also explains that woke faith is incompatible with Christian faith for many reasons. First, it is atheistic and denies God and Christ. Second, it replaces biblical sin and salvation with a false view of salvation through racial struggle and constant warfare. Third, it is a utopian vision that believes we can somehow create a “heaven on Earth” without Christ.

Woke theology is seductive because we do see injustice and inequality in our fallen world. But we do not need to employ a Marxist worldview and secular tools to address real social problems in our society. Many of the successful social movements in the last two centuries (abolition, suffrage, civil rights) rested on a biblical foundation. We don’t need woke theology to bring salt and light to our fallen world.

In previous commentaries, I’ve quoted Dennis Prager’s assessment that the left ruins just about every part of society it touches. The latest example comes from an editorial by Derek Hunter of how political correctness is ruining the film industry.

The example he cited was the decision by Hollywood to make a movie about the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The producers were able to secure Helen Mirren to play the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. This was a key component to the project since there might not be much interest in this story with the public but getting Mirren on the project would probably increase interest and put more people in movie seats.

There was just one problem. Helen Mirren isn’t Jewish. For most of us, having a person who isn’t Jewish play a Jewish person isn’t a problem. As one of the guests on my radio program put it: “It’s called acting.”

In his commentary, Derek Hunter, reminded us of another controversy in Hollywood. That one surfaced when it was announced that Scarlett Johannsen would be playing a trans person in an upcoming movie. When criticism came from the “trans community,” she dropped out of the project and the movie was scrapped.

The publicity image for the film showed Helen Mirren in prosthetics that made her look more like the Israeli politician. Derek Hunter then asked, “Are prosthetics not allowed anymore? Should Gary Oldman not have played Winston Churchill because he’s not bald and obese?”

This led to an interesting discussion on my radio program about what would no longer be allowed in Hollywood. Perhaps the funniest line was that if we used the latest politically correct criteria then Leonard Nimoy couldn’t even be allowed to play Spock in Star Trek because he wasn’t a Vulcan.

I guess we need to laugh because the reality of all of this is so tragic.

Earlier this month, a news story reported that the University of Memphis was offering professors $3,000 to infuse their courses with diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. When we talked about this on my radio program, my guests wondered if professors who were already doing this for free might feel slighted.

Social justice concepts like critical race theory and “anti-racism” have been injected into college classes for some time. But this announcement brought these ideas out in the open. “An all-faculty email obtained by the Free Beacon shows the university offering a $1,500 stipend after professors redesign their curricula, with another $1,500 after teaching the redesigned course.”

The university working group links to a report that emphasizes the need for “anti-racism,” which is a term popularized by Ibram X. Kendi. It calls for “designing anti-racist syllabi and developing skills and appropriate dispositions for facilitating anti-racist classroom discussion.”

As you might imagine, the proposal has attracted the attention of Tennessee lawmakers who are critical of offering such incentives to professors. And one professor at the university explained that they have “had a hard time retaining good faculty at our salary levels, so anytime you see money being spent on non-student or non-faculty causes, it makes you scratch your head.”

You have probably heard pundits, politicians, and professors dismiss the idea that social justice ideas like critical race theory and anti-racism are being taught in education. This latest example not only shows that these ideas are being taught, but at least one university wants to provide a financial incentive for teaching those ideas.

Inflation is a growing problem, and yet our political leaders have very few policy tools they can use to combat it. If you are older, you might remember the inflation of the 1970s, and you might even remember how the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker with the support President Ronald Reagan dealt with it. He increased interest rates and reduced the money supply. Unfortunately, those tools can’t be used this time.

Rod Thomson writes about the “coming financial vise” that illustrates why the solution four decades ago can’t be implemented this time. The current Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell can’t employ the same one-two punch. Paul Volker raised interest rates higher than inflation. By contrast, Jerome Powell is only talking about raising interest rates from 0.25 percent to 0.50 percent.

Why can’t the Federal Reserve raise interest rates higher? The simple answer is the US national debt. I encourage you to look at the US Debt Clock. As I write this, the national debt is $29.7 trillion. The interest we will pay on that debt is $422 billion. I will guarantee that between the time I write this, and you go to that website, you will see that those numbers have increased.

Let’s do some simple math, each one percent increase adds an additional $422 billion. If the Federal Reserve just wanted to raise interest rates to five percent, the interest on the national debt would be $2.1 trillion. That is roughly equal to what we the government spends each year on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security combined. That is also more than the Federal government takes in each year of income tax revenue.

This illustrates the “financial vise” that is squeezing the federal government and the Federal Reserve in 2022. I also think that is why few in government want to talk about it.

Earlier this month, a political commentator on CNN came to the realization that having Covid is not a moral failing. He declared, that “we unknowingly turned having Covid into some sort of judgment on your character.” His remedy was for us to “recognize that getting Covid isn’t a moral failing! It’s a super infectious disease that you can protect against but can’t guarantee you won’t get it.”

That declaration was too much for columnist Charles Cooke who asked: “Unknowingly”? “We need to recognize”? “Societally”? He then wondered if the commentator might actually live in a sensory-deprivation tank.

There is nothing “unknowing” about these previous claims. They are the foundation of the liberal, progressive attack against other Americans. Anyone who had legitimate questions about the value of lockdowns and mandates was labeled a “Covidiot.” The governor of Florida was described as “DeathSantis” while the governor of Texas was accused of belonging to a “death cult.”

A prominent editor at the New York Times compared the southern states that (at the time) showed a seasonal surge of Covid to the slaveholding Confederacy. But as I explained in my September 10 commentary on “Covid Spin,” there was no discernable pattern if you list the Covid deathrate per 100,000 by state.

If the politically charged comments on MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times are to be believed, you would expect that red states would be at the top and blue states would be at the bottom. We will post the chart again so you can see there is no discernable pattern.

Four months later, at least one commentator finally acknowledged the obvious. I suspect it is because the number of Covid cases have increased so much in blue states. Better late than never.

Lots of controversial ideas are being proposed right now, and I know you probably wonder how to respond to them. Eliminate the Electoral College, regulate campaign speech, and end the filibuster are just a few. The best way to respond to many of these proposals is to remind Americans that our country is a republic not a democracy.

The framers recognized that the country would be quite diverse. They wanted to create a government that would allow different viewpoints to get a hearing. They didn’t want the president merely to be elected by the larger populations in the cities like Boston and New York.

That is why we have an Electoral College. States with small populations feared that states with large populations would always select their candidate. The Electoral College forces candidates to campaign in the entire country, not just in population areas.

That also explains why we have the House of Representatives elected by voters every two years. But regardless of its size, each state gets two US senators who were selected by the state legislatures every six years, but now are also elected by the popular vote.

We have a Bill of Rights in the Constitution to protect Americans (especially minorities) from a democracy where the majority could take away fundamental rights from a minority. We enjoy freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to bear arms, and freedom from unlawful search and seizure.

Even the idea of a filibuster in the US Senate was implemented so that the majority would be forced to hear the arguments from the minority before passing important legislation. The filibuster may have been abused, but the concept once again illustrates our constitutional order.

Many critics in the current generation are making unfair judgments about past generations with an air of moral superiority. I call it generational judgmentalism. Victor Davis Hanson merely says that these critics are self-important and ungracious and have very little gratitude for those in the past that did so much for all of us.

He observes that these “21st century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.” Of course, we could also add the millions buried in military cemeteries who fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy today.

He also asks several important questions. “What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt – much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?” Another is, “What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities?”

One of the key buzzwords for this generation is “infrastructure.” But Hanson wonders “when was the last time it built anything comparable to Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project – much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?”

It is easy to criticize previous generations while using today’s standards of morality and behavior. It is easy to forget the struggles previous generations had to face because they were not blessed with the numerous technological advances we enjoy today.

It’s easy to tear down. It’s not so easy to rebuild. These are the questions we need to ask of the critics bent on destroying society. They don’t seem to offer anything significant in its place.