Love and the More Perfect Union combines proven strategies for achieving relationship harmony with the "continuum of connection," an innovative model of emotions that provides invaluable insights into how we love and the energetics of intimate relationships. It distills the complex world of relationships to its essentials, surfaces secret challenges and opportunities, and serves up six simple and actionable precepts for harmony and happiness. With its call for creative culture-creation and positive thinking, it is fluff free, straightforward, elegantly written, wise and immensely useful. Find out why one recent reader called it "a great resource for anyone interested in creating more paradise within their relationship." Intimate relationships are massive, murky territory. They're crisscrossed by a tangle of motivations-lust, love, attachment, loyalty, necessity, and more. They're the heart of darkness and the heart of light, too. By their very nature, they defy rational analysis. We stumble into relationships and do our best to muddle through. For most of us, being in a relationship is like trying to drive from Albuquerque to Newfoundland without a map. These pages provide a compass. More specifically, you will come away from these pages with four specific information sets: An understanding of the three core yearnings that drive our behavior in relationships. Insight into a paradox that is inherent in all relationships. We yearn to be autonomous and we also yearn to connect. The result: we're often out of synch with our partners, not to mention ourselves. Relationships require ongoing management of this tension. A visual map for understanding the dance of relationship and how to manage it skillfully. In the context of action, we humans thrive on concreteness. We benefit from clear mental maps, yet we tend to navigate our relationships without them. By this map, there are five chambers in the house of love. In this book, you will learn what they are, how to identify which one you're in, and how to migrate to one that feels better. The understanding that the work of relationship includes Tiny Country Creation. We are each of us Founding Fathers and Mothers in the land of love.

The United States is facing fundamental budgetary challenges. Federal debt held by the public exceeds 70 percent of the nation's annual output or GDP, a percentage not seen since 1950, and a continuation of current policies would boost the debt further. Although debt would decline to 58 percent of GDP in 2022 under the current-law assumptions that underlie the CBO's baseline projections, those projections depend heavily on significant increases in taxes and decreases in spending that are scheduled to take effect at the beginning of January. If, instead, lawmakers maintained current policies by preventing most of those changes from occurring, what the CBO refers to as the alternative fiscal scenario, debt held by the public would increase to 90 percent of GDP 10 years from now and continue to rise rapidly thereafter. This book reviews the scale and sources of the federal government's budgetary imbalance, various options for bringing spending and taxes into closer alignment, and criteria that lawmakers and the public might use to evaluate different approaches to deficit reduction.