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Sweet Tammy's is now in a major New York City Supermarket Chain - Fairways. It is all due to Daniel's excellent marketing skills, Tamara's culinary baking expertise, her father, David's organizing talent and their new label featuring the family's youngest baker - Stella!
You can still order by calling the bakery if you do not live in New York City, or the Mid Atlantic States, where Whole Foods now carries their expanding product line of artisanal breads, cookies and other baked goods.
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John Fund's new book will be out in about a year and focuses on a high profile Obama Cabinet member. Should prove fascinating. Stay tuned.
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Response from long time dear friend and fellow memo reader to previous posting. He, like myself, believes Boehner, is incapable of getting his message across so the simple minded can understand. This is where Gingrich, excelled but because Newt carried so much baggage he too lost his audience.
"Dick: Erick Erickson’s posting today on “Why Are we Not Talking about America’s $123 Trillion in Unfunded Liabilities” reminded me of your posting from J.R. Dunn a few days back on “How the Left Dupes Conservative Voters” and also of a speech that Arthur Brooks gave to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation last year. (YouTube: QPTcx-4-8IY) We are simply not communicating with the low information voters – which includes most of the media.
Remember, the journalists are people whose mothers told them they were special and were going to do great things. But they couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so they didn’t become doctors. And they couldn’t do physics, so they didn’t become scientists. And they couldn’t do calculus, so they didn’t go into finance. And they didn’t want to work hard, so that ruled out a life as a lawyer. So they became journalists, where they can convince themselves they are doing great things without having to know anything, work hard, or think.
J.R. Dunn pointed out that the Left (and I include those gullible journalists in with the Left) is quick to report on Republican scandal right before an election. He forgot to mention the breaking of the Mark Foley scandal right before the 2006 election; that probably cost the Republicans the House and led to the disastrous increase in government spending that started with the 2007-2008 House. (The same Mark Foley who claimed to be an anti-pornography conservative Republican who is now, according to Wikipedia, living with his boyfriend dermatologist in Palm Beach.) But Dunn noted the effect of the reporting of the Bush drunk driving incident, or Romney’s heartless failings – putting a dog on top of his car, murdering the wife of a former employee of a Bain buyout, or even buying companies – how heartless can you get?
We need to refute these emotional allegations with emotional responses. Arthur Brooks pointed out that when we focus on an emotional issue – children starving, moral rectitude, maybe sex? – our brains are not attuned to focus on facts. The media wants to report only emotional issues, and doesn’t report facts. If the media did report facts, they would lose viewers who would turn to something that supported the emotional use of their brains. (Arthur Brooks’ comments were repeated at the National Review Institute in DC a couple of weeks ago, but I think his speech before the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, reported above, is much more worthwhile, even if it is 40 minutes long.) But because we spend so much time talking about and refuting emotional charges, there is no place left to talk about numbers.
Most Americans can’t figure out the relationships between $85 billion and $3.6 trillion. They get millions and billions and trillions confused. They don’t want to focus on that when there is a sex scandal to be considered. If it gets more complicated, like talking about $123 trillion in prevent values of unfunded liabilities. We don't talk about it because 70-80% of the American public do not have the capacity to understand two words: "present value." When you say Social Security and Medicare, they think, "future expense." They think, "I don't want to talk about future expense."
The $123 trillion is not future expense. It is the amount we owe NOW if we were to set it aside, watch it grow at a regular interest rate, and pay out as the liabilities come due. (Is it the T-bill rate? I don't know what these numbers are calculated with, although it is important.)
Maybe the best way to message is to explain that this $123 trillion is the principal on the mortgage. Most people understand the mortgage must be paid. Communicate it this way: spread out over 300 million Americans, $123 trilion is an individual debt of $410,000 per person. The $17.5 trillion in the operating debt adds another $60,000 per person. So each person owes about half a million, each family of 4 owes about $2 million.
They need to set that side and invest it NOW in order to fund the current debt, Social Security and Medicare in the future. Pay up. Then they can live on what’s left. If we talked about it in terms of present value, or as a mortgage, maybe we would be able to message better as a party.
Byron York makes the same point in today’s Washington Examiner, when he criticizes Boehner’s editorial reprinted in your posting today.
Boehner just doesn’t know how to message that we have to stop spending and borrowing, that these cuts are only 2%, that the Republicans would rather make smart cuts, but they don’t have the power to do that. Boehner doesn’t know how to make the emotional pitch – we want to help, but we can’t. Bring up the violins.
We are sorry, but President Obama and the Democrats are going to make irrational cuts that will hurt our economy and people who need help because the Democrats won’t come up with any better idea. That's the truth -- and it's an emotional message. And a shame. All the best, B--" So much of America says, "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the parties" or "They are all alike."
Sure, there are dishonest Republicans and corrupt Republicans and Republicans who have sordid characters. But at least the Republican party still reflects the old school thought that morality matters. If we focus on these issues, however, we turn our brains to emotional matters, and do not require our citizens (and the poor, hapless reporters) to think.
And if we can’t get some focus on these issues NOW, they will only get worse with each passing day. (See 1 below.)
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This is why Obama is a fraud and why you should never pay attention to what he says, only what he does. He is a pathological liar! (See 2 below.)
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Hagel just keeps running into himself and his mouth. (Se 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama’s "Really Stupid, Stupid, Stupid Sequester"
By John Ransom
In the opaque world of sovereign debt credit ratings, one of the most important issues facing a rating agency is a country’s economic growth. One of the reasons why the United States has had such large deficits is because economic growth for the last decade and a half has been anemic.
I highlight that here because recently I took umbrage with the Congressional Budget Office projections on the U.S. economy and the country’s budget deficit, writing for Townhall about the budget problems we will face once interest rates begin to rise. The “thorny problem with the CBO forecast is that after this year the report is contingent upon the economy growing at its maximum sustainable level. The CBO pegs GDP growth as modest this year – again -- but bets the farm that GDP growth will hit ‘3.4 percent in 2014 and an average of 3.6 percent a year from 2015 through 2018.’”
This is important because rating agencies know that the growth rate of a country’s GDP, in large measure, determines the amount the government collects in taxes. The amount they collect in taxes, minus what they spend, equals the deficit. And rating agency Moody’s has also now raised questions about the CBO forecast for both GDP growth and the deficit for at least the years 2014-18, according to MNI news.
Here’s a lengthy, but mostly relevant part, of MNI’s analysis. “In the end, what will be decisive is whether overall measures taken by the U.S. government will bring back the debt trajectory on a sustainable path, and on that front, economic projections matter, with rating agencies often referring to the Congressional Budget Office. Moody's noted Tuesday that the CBO's projections rely on "strong growth rates" for the real GDP over 2014-2018.
Those forecasts are, at least for 2015, also higher than the private-sector consensus and than the top of the Federal Reserve's range, the report continued. "If these high rates of growth do not materialize, the modest reduction in the debt ratios in the middle of the decade will not occur, and the rising trend will be more pronounced in later years," the report warned. In other words, if you are going to rely on the CBO projections of aggressive GDP growth here at home then Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are right:
Either go big on cutting spending or go home. It’s clear we won’t “grow” our GDP sufficient to outstrip sending. As we highlighted this week on Ransom Notes Radio, Bowles and Simpson, the chairs of President Barack Obama’s bipartisan commission on deficit reduction, are so disgusted they have been proposing bigger reductions in government spending than originally recommended -- now that it looks like Obama will try to get away with no reductions at all. "We learned the hard way with our commission, the harder we made (the proposal), the more support we got. It's either go big or go home. This is pathetic,"
Simpson said on CNBC of the government’s inability to cut spending through any means other than an across-the-board budget cut, known as sequester. It’s also stupid -- at least according to President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, Erskine Bowles. "When this really stupid, stupid, stupid sequester goes into effect, we're going to start to feel how this government is really dysfunctional. People will see it really quick and get really angry with these people in Congress and the administration." Bowles told CNBC. "We are operating our government on a month-to-month basis right now."
Thanks for the sequester Mr. Obama. And make no mistake, sequester is a product of the White House. “The President’s part of the sequester,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., “the White House recommended it, frankly, back in August 2011, so now we’re feeling the effects of it.” And here’s the really bad news: The CBO report is predicated on spending cuts that most likely won’t happen if Obama has his way. If you combine it with GDP growth, that’s not very likely, historically speaking, and, well, uh-oh.
Since 2000, the economy has only enjoyed two years of growth in excess of 3 percent. And the long-term trend line for economic growth since 1970 is still downward for the country. Since Obama has become president, quarterly GDP has only come in higher than 3 percent on an annualized basis three times.
The idea that, suddenly, after our current year, we are going to realize growth rates around 3.5 percent is only a magician’s trick designed to downplay the size of the deficit from 2014-18. So, the deficit will be larger than the CBO predictions if the economy doesn’t grow at the sunshine and roses rates the CBO has forecast. It will be larger if spending cuts don’t happen.
And the economy can’t and won’t grow by the GDP growth rates forecast by the CBO. Forget history. In this case just consult common sense. Now that we’ve seen the effects on the economy of the several Obama tax increases since the first of year, what happens when further tax increases replace spending cuts?
I give you a three-word answer that happens to be the smartest thing coming out of Washington right now: Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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2)The Quote of the Decade: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.
It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills.
It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies.
Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally.
Leadership means that, 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.
America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better." ~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006.
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3)New Hagel controversies cloud confirmation prospects
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will continue to press for a final vote on this controversial nomination next week when the Senate returns from recess. The drum beat against Chuck Hagel's bid to become secretary of defense has increased in volume with each passing day. Here is a round-up of the top stories:
Pressure is mounting on the White House:Democrats ask White House to pull Hagel
More damaging Hagel statements come to light:
Hagel said Israel is headed toward apartheid
Hagel said Israel is headed toward apartheid
Hagel said America is not "fair and credible" in the Mideast because it "tilted very much to the Israeli side on settlements"
Hagel withholds access to video and transcripts from controversial speeches:
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