A Looming Crisis — & a Call for Solutions

May 6th, 2013 // 3:51 pm @ Oliver DeMille

Most Americans have no ideas it is coming. But it is just around the corner.

It’s one of those technical changes that only wonks pay attention to, so few people realize how big this will be.

In fact, it’s a serious crisis in the making. And unlike the Y2K scare in 1999, this crisis is a sure thing.

What is it?

Well, put simply, this coming January, many companies will be required to extend Obamacare health care to their employees.

The costs of this are significant, and will force many small and larger businesses to make some very tough choices.

The result will be a lot of layoffs, downsizing, reduced pay, and outsourcing.

Service will suffer, and response times will plummet.

Most families and individuals plan on a yearly basis, running January 1 to December 31, so they may not know how that a lot of businesses run on a fiscal year—from April 1 to April 1, July 1 to July 1, or October 1 to October 1.

This is very important, because we just witnessed the first big round of businesses (whose fiscal year is April to April) factoring in the costs of the January 2014 Obamacare requirements.

The number of layoffs and cuts is a serious concern.

But those who run April to April have only had to factor in three months of Obamacare costs so far, so the damage has been minimal.

It’s going to get increasingly worse on July 1, and then by October 1 it will start having a major impact.

By the first of January, when everyone will have to pay the higher costs, the effect will be huge.

Again, because this is a numerical concern, most people aren’t paying attention. Here’s the crux of the problem:

• Our economy is already struggling with a weak recovery.
• The increasing tax and regulatory burden on business has dampened innovation.
• The schools seldom teach innovation or initiative—indeed they usually promote the opposite.
• International innovation is rising.
• Business is reticent to invest or spend, because the current environment in Washington is highly uncertain.
• Big business, which has a high surplus right now, is finding better political environments in other nations—so the money will naturally flow to where business is treated better.
• The Obamacare requirements are making business a lot more costly, and they mostly kick in this coming January.

A lot of businesses are scrambling.

For example, in the past few months I’ve received email from a number of friends who are business owners or who consult with small businesses—saying that their only choice is to either lay off a lot of employees or shut down their business.

One company, for example, is trying to prepare for next year, but has realized that the additional cost of Obamacare for their firm will be at least $18,000 a month.

This is a fairly small company, with close ties to its people.

The last thing it wants to do is lay off employees. But what to do? The costs are simply prohibitive.

Laying off is the obvious option; and after digging deeper, it may be the only option.

How would you counsel companies in this predicament? (Note that most companies are dealing with this right now.) What ideas do you have? I’m sincerely asking for input.

What can they do?

Thousands of companies are asking the same thing right now, and many others will do so before the end of 2013.

This is going to be a real shock to the economy.

A crisis is coming.

But back to the question. How can small companies that are already financially tight comply with the new regulations—without laying off or cutting salaries?

I’m hoping you see some real solutions.

The obvious one is to innovate—to expand sales into new markets and make a lot of extra cash.

The regulatory challenges of such a strategy are, alas, a serious problem. At least in the United States.

So, thinking like an owner, what would you do?

I know you don’t have financials or details in front of you for any one company facing this challenge, but take a stab at this problem anyway—because almost all businesses are doing the same thing right now. It’s the only realistic way to look at Obamacare, because it’s the way pretty much every business owner is looking at it.

Specifically: Costs are going up significantly, with no offsetting increases in income.

In fact, higher taxes and increased regulations make growth even more difficult.

In this environment, how can you absorb the Obamacare costs without laying off a bunch of employees?

Or letting them go and hiring all new people who are desperate for jobs and will work for much lower pay?

Or simply taking your business to Brazil or India or some other country where growth is actually rewarded?

Please send me your responses. What can be done?

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Oliver DeMille is the chairman of the Center for Social Leadership and co-creator of Thomas Jefferson Education.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Category : Blog &Economics &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Government &Leadership &Producers &Prosperity

Oliver DeMille Speaking Tour This Month

April 6th, 2013 // 9:51 am @ Oliver DeMille

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Oliver DeMille Speaking Tour This Month

Specific information on each event follows – scroll down for details.

Important updates to the speaking schedule:

1. Registration almost closed on CA:

As of this email send, the Rancho Cucamonga event currently has less than 20 seats available; so if you’ve been holding back or have a friend or family member you want to have attend with you, please secure your registration today.

We have people flying and driving from quite a distance for these seminars, so please don’t assume you’ll be able to show up and be accommodated. We would be so disappointed if there wasn’t room for you!

2. Early Bird for South Jordan:

Because of our demanding travel schedule during the week prior we will be unavailable for last minute issues, and are therefore are urging early registration for the South Jordan event. To incentivize this, $75 seminar cost will be raised to $95 for those registering on Tuesday, April 16th and thereafter.

Please share this opportunity, and the early bird deadline, with your TJEd friends and groups, as well as those interested in learning more about Leadership Education.

3. Other events:

Additional speaking and book signing events for the LeaderShift publication tour are listed here.

9th KEY SEMINAR INFORMATION

The 7 Keys of Great Teaching are the crux of great education. When they are effectively applied in any home, school or other educational setting, learning drastically increases.

The 8^th Key (Security, not Stress) teaches that the happiest, most effective teachers and parents approach teaching with a relaxed, enjoyable attitude when they are well versed in and fully understand the principles they are teaching; and that this helps students really internalize the critical lesson that learning is fun and doesn’t require overwhelming stress to accomplish.

The Ninth Key

In this brand new seminar by Oliver and Rachel DeMille, learn the 9^th Key of Great Teaching, a key that will take all your learning, teaching and parenting to a whole new level! In this exciting event you’ll learn how to improve mentoring, and you’ll learn how to inspire your students with a whole new technique that makes all the difference.

The 9^th Key is revolutionary and powerful. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn it, how to apply it effectively, and how to get started right away. Whether you are a veteran or newcomer to TJEd, or anywhere in between, this seminar will help you drastically improve your education and that of everyone you mentor!

Seminar Details, Rancho Cucamonga, California

• The TJEd Spring 2013 SoCal seminar will be held on Saturday, April 13 at the Rancho Cucamonga James L. Brulte Senior Center (location info here)

• There are only 100 seats at this event (less than 20 left now!), so enroll early to get in—first come, first served

• Schedule:

9:30 am: The 5 Foundations of all Great Leadership Education, by Oliver DeMille
10:30 am: The 8 Types of Education, by Oliver DeMille
11:30 am: The Ninth Key!: A Whole New Level of Great Education, by Oliver DeMille
12:30 pm: Panel/Lunch Break (please bring your lunch to enjoy the contributions of a moderated panel of veteran TJEd educators while you eat)
1:30-2:30: Questions and Answers with Oliver & Rachel DeMille
(Bring your questions about your family’s education, your students, and your classroom if you are a full-time teacher!)

• Cost: $75 per person

To enroll in the Rancho Cucamonga Seminar,
click here >>

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Seminar Details, South Jordan, Utah

• The TJEd Spring 2013 Utah seminar will be held on Saturday, April 20 at the Paradigm High School (location here)

• Schedule:

9:30 am: The 5 Foundations of all Great Leadership Education, by Oliver DeMille
10:30 am: The 8 Types of Education, by Oliver DeMille
11:30 am: The Ninth Key!: A Whole New Level of Great Education, by Oliver DeMille
12:30 pm: Panel/Lunch Break (please bring your lunch to enjoy the contributions of a moderated panel of veteran TJEd educators while you eat)
1:30-2:30: Questions and Answers with Oliver & Rachel DeMille
(Bring your questions about your family’s education, your students, and your classroom if you are a full-time teacher!)

• Cost: $75 per person through 4/15; thereafter, $95

To enroll in the South Jordan, UT Seminar,
click here >>

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Category : Blog &event

TJEd Events, April 2013 (Oliver & Rachel, live and in-person)

March 18th, 2013 // 7:28 am @ Oliver DeMille

Category : Blog &event

How to Get More out of What You Read

March 13th, 2013 // 11:37 am @ Oliver DeMille

Two Books Reviewed by Oliver DeMille

People often ask me if I’m going to write a book called Thomas Jefferson Education for Adults.

They usually say this after reading my books A Thomas Jefferson Education or A Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens, or both.

They get excited about getting a truly great education, not settling for anything less than the highest quality of learning for themselves and their children, and they wonder how to really get that kind of education themselves.

My answer is always, “Start reading the classics.”

When people follow this suggestion, many of them soon realize they’re not getting as much out of their reading as some people seem to.

When they ask how they can get more from their reading, I frequently tell them to study the logical fallacies.

Too many classrooms and schools today teach students what to think rather than how to think, and even many professional and graduate schools focus on when to think.

Teaching students how to think (deeply, broadly, creatively, innovatively, etc.) seems to be a lost art in too much of our modern educational system.

Two books on fallacies are an excellent response: The Art of Argument by Aaron Larsen, Joelle Hodge, and Chris Perrin, and Joseph Spider and the Fallacy Farm by David Grant.

Read these books together, since the first is an excellent workshop on how to think and the second is a fun story that will pull in younger students.

These books not only teach readers how to think, they inspire them to engage thinking.

In short, to think.

A lot.

Specifically, these two books teach a number of fallacies of thinking—in an interesting and effective way.

I highly recommend them for any youth, parent and teacher who wants to boost their students’ thinking ability.

In fact, both books are a great read for any adult.

When people know the fallacies, they automatically start thinking more deeply and they get a lot more out of everything they read—especially the classics.

So if you’re reading important books and want to significantly increase your rate of learning from them, check out these two books.

It’ll make a huge difference for your students and, even more importantly, for you.

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Oliver DeMille is the chairman of the Center for Social Leadership and co-creator of Thomas Jefferson Education.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Category : Blog &Book Reviews &Education &Featured

The Latest Filibuster

March 11th, 2013 // 1:11 pm @ Oliver DeMille

A Giant Step for Mankind…

Okay, the subtitle of this article is a little overblown, but I heard something that I found just plain fascinating the other day.

In fact, it is something I haven’t heard for a long time.

I was researching in a university library, sitting at a table looking for data in a stack of scholarly journals, when I heard the most unlikely thing in such a place.

“Rand Paul’s filibuster is so cool,” a girl’s voice said. My mind was focused on tables of World Bank summaries of currency values in industrial nations, and there were a lot of voices as students walked past and talked.

Most of them talked about classes, romances or roommates, and I tuned out to their words as I researched.

But my ears perked up and my mind tuned in when I heard these words.

I looked up to see a college girl, probably late teens or early twenties walking with three friends. The others nodded in response to her words.

“Really?” I thought, “Somebody thinks a national Republican figure is cool?” When I’ve heard such words before, it was always reserved to President Obama.

I mean, Ronald Reagan gets his share of praise from the older crowd, but the college students I’ve overheard recently saying a politician is cool have all mentioned either Obama or Ron Paul.

But a Republican who really could win the nomination, this was something different.

As a writer, I like to read and research in libraries (‘cause that’s where the books are, to paraphrase Willy Horton), restaurants and other public areas.

People walk by talking about things, and often they say something that helps an author’s thought process.

I went back to my research, and I forgot about the incident until I went to lunch.

As I balanced my attention between a salad and a copies of the World Bank tables, I was shocked to hear a girl from the next table say, “Did you see the filibuster yesterday? Rand Paul is so cool.”

I turned my head, expecting to see the same group of students, but to my surprise a whole different group sat there nodding.

What has happened?

Is it possible that Republicans will come up with a cool candidate in 2016?

Maybe.

It’s a long way off, to be sure.

But the hippest candidate always wins, or at least has in every election since the technicolor media age began in earnest around 1980.

Howard Dean once said that the way to know who won a presidential debate is to turn off the sound and just watch their body language.

On an even bigger scale, just turn off the television and internet and ask college-age students which candidate is really cool.

Jeb Bush suggested recently that he might run, Time magazine called potential candidate Marco Rubio the Savior of the Republican party.

Or did it just ask us if Rubio might redeem a party that can’t seem to get the Latino vote vital to winning the White House.

The whole idea of electing a cool president is frustrating for many on the Right, who see this as shallow popularity contesting in what should be one of the most serious votes anyone makes in an election year.

Still, the cool test wins every time, whether or not it should.

One thing is for sure.

Hillary Clinton is considered way cool, so if Republicans have any desire to take back the presidency in 2016 they need to meet a high standard.

More Mr. Smith Goes to Washington filibusters may be ahead, but Senator Paul’s filibuster seems to have caught many young people’s attention because it was so sincere.

That’s hard to duplicate, but for now Rand Paul’s popularity in the college crowd is worth watching.

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Oliver DeMille is the chairman of the Center for Social Leadership and co-creator of Thomas Jefferson Education.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Category : Blog &Culture &Current Events &Featured &Government &Leadership &Politics