American habit of falling short, from new year’s resolutions to voting
We take our bounty for granted, sometime, unchallenged with so many opportunities. Is that why we break our New Year's resolutions and also fail to vote at election time?
By Ray Hanania
FREE/American commitments New Year resolutions, voting/Sunday Jan. 5, 2025
Every new year, about 67 percent of Americans make the same New Year’s resolution to lose weight.
My guess is more like 80 percent of Americans need to lose weight but only about 40 percent will actually lose some amount of weight, and far fewer will actually keep the weight off long enough to benefit.
It’s the dumbest resolution an American can make. We are people who engorge ourselves in excessive gluttony. Americans eat more than any other people on the planet and have the highest calorie intake.
Well, not all Americans, of course. About 47 million Americans, or about 14 percent of the population are in food-insecure households or are on the verge of starvation and don’t eat like pigs.
The numbers vary depending on the source, but we Americans spend about 14 to 17 percent of our income on food, ranking 3rd behind spending on transportation (17 percent) and housing (33 percent). That’s misleading considering we eat most of our food in our homes and much while driving.
We make this resolution to lose weight as we come out of a period that is built on excessive consumption -- consumption of food and on spending of money on merchandise. We spend a lot. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s Eve. How do you not eat during these holidays? And then comes Easter, a feast.
The resolution isn’t something we make to achieve a goal, but rather, we do it because it makes us feel good or better about ourselves. We certainly don’t really lose weight.
We just love to eat, as it is the most direct and personal form of self-satisfaction we can have, that is if you don’t include the category of sex.
We accept this annual cycle of personal failed promises, commitment and ambition in stride as being a part of our culture, the way we tend to accept other cultural failures, like not voting.
The opportunity to vote comes all the time, several times a year almost every year. Politics is the one factor that torches our emotions more than anything else, except, of course again, the desire for sex.
We get so angry every election. Our property taxes skyrocket, growing faster than our income. The politicians get all the benefits and profits. We regular people have to dream of the lottery to get rich, but politicians in government make money from their connections.
Look at members of Congress. In 2014, a study showed that a majority of members of Congress are millionaires while more than 50 percent of Americans barely have $5,000 to spend to cover an emergency. Americans are growing in credit card debt, while our national politicians revel in their prolific and growing wealth. Who do you think keeps saying, falsely, that the “economy is good,” “inflation is slowing,” and “there is less unemployment and more jobs”?
The politicians, of course. Not the people who are struggling. Their incomes dropped in half because of inflation, while prices and costs of living and taxation continue to soar.
Our taxes, fees, insurance, utilities, and everyday costs are rising while deflating our incomes which lag far behind. So all this information about how the people we elect to represent our interests seems to work only to represent their own interests.
This all makes us voters angry, but apparently not angry enough. We have the power to vote people in and out of office but only about half of those qualified to vote actually got to the polling place to vote. And sometimes it gets worse, like down to 14 percent of registered voters. When we talk about “registered voters” we are not talking about everyone who qualifies to register to vote, because not everyone registers, so the numbers are, in actuality, even worse than what I am presenting.
We make a commitment to vote to bring about change, reduce our taxes, and improve our lives in much the same way that we vow to lose weight at the start of a new year. But it all fizzles away. We give up.
I can’t force you to do the right thing, like go on a diet to become healthier or to remain energized to vote to oust the people who increase our property taxes like in Cook County where the Assessor, Fritz Kaegi, has shifted the burden of assessment from businesses to homeowners driving up property taxes record suppressive amounts. It’s bad in Cook County folks, but who wants to make the effort to hold Kaegi responsible for his actions to punish homeowners?
All I can tell you is not to blame anyone else if you are overweight or your property taxes are too high. If you can’t sustain the commitment, stop whining. It’s your fault.
You can do something about it all. But you have to do it because you want to, not because you are emotional. Make a real commitment and follow through. Do it!
Or, just waddle your overweight flabby ass to the bank and write that check to pay your exorbitant, excessive, and overbearing property taxes.
(To stop Kaegi’s property tax hikes, go to Facebook and search “Remove Fritz Kaegi” or CLICK THIS LINK.)
Don't sell business executives short when it comes to greed. Thanks to Citizens United, money dominates American politics. Many business executives are accustomed to buying lower business taxes and more deregulation in the same manner they lease luxury cars. For them, politics is just another business expense on the balance sheet. Musk and Ramaswamy know exactly what I'm saying.