The presidency of Donald J. Trump had many notable accomplishments. Among them are starting to secure the border; successful and effective foreign and trade policies; tax rate reductions that increased revenue; three excellent appointments to the Supreme Court and a number of effective cabinet appointees and executive orders. He also made the Republican party more populist bringing in blue collar families and driving out the old “country club Republican” image. I’m sure there are more that I am leaving out in the interest of brevity.

Somewhere in your pocket, purse or wallet, you probably have some of those pieces of greenish paper with a number on each of the four corners. You use this paper (or the digital equivalent on your phone) to acquire things of value that you need and can use like food. And others readily give you those tangible and useful things in exchange for pieces of paper that don’t even burn very well or even worse, for some 1s and 0s in a computer. The whole concept of money is based on trust. Trust in the system behind that money. Without it, that paper ,or the 1s and 0s, are literally not worth the paper they are printed on. For proof, I can show you $100 million Zimbabwe bill. It’s not worth a cent because no one trusts that government.

I have attended seminars and lectures of various sorts for decades. I believe in lifelong learning for many reasons and as I approach age 68, I still have much I can learn. Since college, most of this learning has come from my professional associations, investments, CPA education and such. Of late, however, I have gotten more out of church sermons than almost anywhere else.

The press is obsessed with the Trump indictments, as they are with all things Donald Trump. I have nothing to add on that subject that you have not already heard. I believe there are now ten candidates in the Republican presidential primary and there is lots of chatter about whether any of the nine not named Trump can beat him. But while all that is in the headlines, there is something going on about 10 pages deep in the news that may be as or more significant. That “something” is Gavin Newsom.

There has been plenty of spin about the debt limit non-negotiations, then negotiations and finally deal and passage into law. According to the leftist media, Speaker McCarthy endangered the country with unreasonable far-right demands and Biden appropriately refused to negotiate. Then the Speaker passed a bill, which the Senate could not do, and the president began negotiations. Miraculously, the president who would not negotiate suddenly took credit for a great bipartisan achievement that saved the nation. My view is, unsurprisingly, different.

Those of us of a certain age (that is a euphemism for “old”), remember when almost all Americans watched the same TV shows on one of the three networks. We got our news from the hometown paper, the CBS evening news, Newsweek, or Time magazine and maybe Paul Harvey on the radio. There was a commonality of experience and of exposure to information. Not anymore.

The market for U.S. Treasuries is the largest, most liquid, safest and most trusted investment in the world. At over $30 Trillion in size with maturities ranging from 30 days to 30 years, there is plenty to go around. Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, Treasuries are often used in international transactions and foreign governments own them for a number of reasons, including managing their own currency’s value. Banks, pension funds, insurance companies have all used them to store money for decades. U.S. Treasuries are the most important asset and market in the world.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I spent the first 60 years of my life (my grandchildren happily tell me that I am old) living in California and of course I spent 14 years in full time elected office from there. From my birth until 1992, California voted Republican in every presidential election except for Lyndon Johnson’s lopsided win in 1964. Of course, we all know what has happened since then. Not once has the state voted Republican and it is now one of the most reliably blue states in the union. Not so with Florida.

On a Monday morning in June, in the year of our Lord 1215, on a meadow at Runnymede in England, barons and churchmen met with King John and agreed on the “Articles of the Barons,” which a few days later was enshrined into what we now know as the Magna Carta. It put some limitations on the power of the king. It was the beginning of transforming governance from “the rule of man” to the “rule of law.”

I am not against EVs. I own two of them (a Mustang Mach E and a Jaguar iPace) and I bought a plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt as my car to drive in DC back in 2012, which car my younger son still drives today. I love them all. But the future of EVs in the market and the mandates for and incentives thereon are not so simple as love/hate.

I usually try and give some depth to a single topic in each of these missives. You may have noticed that there is a lot going on these days. So today, I will do a shallow dive into a variety of different issues. Some of these will be hard to summarize in a few sentences, but here goes:

Figuring out where the economy is headed is never easy. We have more data available to us now than ever before. That data may actually make divining the future even more difficult because the data is conflicting. Let’s take a look at three important measures of economic activity – Inflation, Employment and Consumer Spending.

For the second week in a row, I feel compelled to write about something I hate to write about. I will have to put off my latest observations about the economy and foreign relations for another week. Again, the leftist press is obsessed with something that is really not that important in the grand scheme of things. But that is what the left does. They manufacture issues out of thin air in order to distract you from the real problems out there that they have created. They are like magicians who focus your eye “up here” so you don’t see the slight of hand going on elsewhere.

I was determined not to write about this. The Trump indictment is such BS. The press’ obsession with it is disgusting. There are so many real problems in the world that are far more significant. But I have no choice. This thing is a “nothing burger” now. But it is likely to trigger powerful impacts over the next year or so.

As part of her successful effort to take the majority back in the House of Representatives in 2006 after 12 years in Republican control, then minority leader Nancy Pelosi used the tagline “culture of corruption” to describe why the voters needed to vote for change. It worked.