With all the crazy stock market fluctuations and wondering if Saturday Night Live can return to its former glory, the average American has been trying to make sense of our monetary system. If only there were a simple answer to these pesky questions, we’d feel a little better about how the dollar is rising against the Euro, if only we knew what that meant. In a survey 40% said the Euro was a tiny tinny car from some small nation whose name they couldn’t pronounce, 30% said ‘What?’ and the rest said, ‘None of the above’.
If only we could understand the language used to describe the economic system, we still wouldn’t have a handle on it, but we’d at least know that compound interest is not a simonizing franchise. If we’d paid better attention in economics class instead of passing notes to Sallie Mae maybe we’d know that Fannie May and Ginny Mae were not cousins of Ellie Mae from the classic TV series Beverly Hillbillies. What’s the fix?
Our economy is in the doldrums so we the people have to take matters into our own hands. In a consumer driven economy, we need to consume, and what’s the best thing to consume when you’re in a funk? Dessert! We’ll have a national bake sale. If everyone baked a cake every week and sold it to everyone else a lot of money would go into the economy. Here’s how it works.
You may have all the ingredients to make a cake, but we’re on a mission here. Go out and buy all the ingredients. Make it a family project. Turn off the TV and turn on the oven! When enough of us buy milk, eggs and butter, it helps the farmers in America’s dairy land. When we buy the flour, we’re providing work for the millers.
If one family buys a dozen eggs, that’s just a drop in the bucket, but if everyone in the country bought them every week, we’ve just created a demand, haven’t we? Egg farms will have new income and just may get out of debt and buy that new car or tractor. Now we’re helping the auto industry.
Pretend you don’t have a steel cake pan. Go out and buy one made in America. Now we’ve created a demand that will help keep in business whatever steel furnaces around Pittsburgh are left. Where do they get the steel? They produce it from the output of mines all over America. Now we’re helping the mine workers.
Bake that cake, or pie. A cheese pie will probably use up all the cheese in the stores creating a demand for the cheese producers in Wisconsin and the rest of America’s dairy-land. They’ll buy more milk from the farmers to make the cheese. See how it works?
Make a fruit filled cake. Buy apples and blueberries from Washington, grapes from California, Peaches from Georgia, and Cranberries from Maine. Don’t forget the grapefruit, lemons, limes and oranges for the other desserts, right here in the sunshine state. Let’s put ‘em all to work!
Shepherd’s pie contains beef, vegetables and potatoes. Make and swap these hot dishes in the neighborhood and help the cattle farmers and vegetable growers.
Do you remember when America had pen pals? Why not cake pals? Send that cake cross country overnight to your cake pal! That will help to bring us all closer together and it creates work for the shipping industry and the airports. Remember fruitcakes? They can go by truck. It doesn’t matter how long that takes. It’ll taste the same 3 or even 6 months from now. That’s right, the Post Office! Turn Ebay into Ebake by putting your cake up for sale on the internet. It won’t stop there; someone will get the bright idea to ship one in a jello-mold. You can put anything in a jello mold. I’ve seen meatloaf in a jello mold. Not the singer; the dish.
Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines and the Pillsbury Dough-boy have gotten together behind this plan. They’re calling it ‘Rise up America’! It’s not just the yeast, they mean it!
With every family cooking, the economy will be rolling! And we’ll all be baking a difference. This one’s a Fonzi scheme because it will lead to…… ‘Happy Days’!
