Cathy's Turning Leaves

Just a few highlights of the national debt since the beginning. Maybe someday I’ll come back and make a more complete list, but I’m feeling lazy. NATIONAL DEBT BY YEAR AMOUNT EQUIVALENT TO 2025 DOLLARS 1791 (after Revolution) $75 Million $2.6 Billion 1835 Zero (Jackson paid it off) – 1860 $65 Million $2.4 Billion 1865 (after Civil War) $2.7 Billion $86 Billion 1918 (WW1) $22 Billion $207 Billion 1945 (WW2) $258.7 Billion $2.7 Trillion 2010 (Post 9/11 ME wars) $13.6 Trillion $18.9 Trillion 2017 (end of Obama’s term) $19.95 Trillion $26 Trillion 2020 (end of Trump’s 1st term) $27.75 Trillion $34.7 Trillion (Inflation rate 4.53% yearly since 2020 = cumulative…

Have you ever seen any Keystone Cops episodes? This was a slapstick film series popular in theatres over a hundred years ago, good for a lot of laughs. The Keystone Cops were bumbling, incompetent fools, their attempts to keep law and order ending in a series of disasters. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. The second Trump administration is a group of bumbling, incompetent fools, but without the benefit of jocularity. This post covers only some of the goofs, oops, screw ups, mistakes, blunders and “administrative errors” made by the Trump administration in the first hundred days. I’d have to write a book to cover all of them! One of his first…

This post has been more than 3 weeks in the making. I thought it would take me 3 or 4 days, but I had to do so much research, and I’ve had so many interruptions. So much is happening so fast on Capital Hill, that I’ve had to go back through the post and insert some of the newest information to keep it up to date. I know I’ve missed plenty of updates, but the whiplash events in Washington are hard to keep track of. Some of the below subjects, I’ve touched on elsewhere in this blog; some I haven’t. I just wanted to gather together some specific points that…

I’ll never understand why people get their news from memes. Memes almost always have wrong information. I’ve seen several different memes declaring that automobile companies are moving back to the US in response to Trump’s tariffs. Every one of those memes is wrong. The meme above was first posted on the Facebook page of America’s Last Line Of Defense The disclaimer for that page says: The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.. You can see their logo on the meme. The meme included a link to their website with the fake article. The disclaimer for that page says: Dunning-Kruger-Times.com…

Trump misspeaks frequently and takes undeserved credit. I’m only covering a few of the more recent ones here. It’s impossible for one person to keep up with ALL the craziness. It would have to be a full time job! He’s been mentioning the “unfair trade” between this country, and Canada and Mexico. Trump is the one who signed the USMCA. He made a show of it when he did. Canada has ZERO tariffs on imported American dairy and poultry as long as the quota limits aren’t exceeded. Since the quotas haven’t been exceeded since USMCA went into effect, those tariffs haven’t been enacted. Trump has obviously forgotten that he and…

Many people still aren’t getting it! Some of this post is excerpts I copied from previous posts, and I added some details. I’m trying to make this subject as simple as possible. The reason we’ve been an economic powerhouse is because of our global trade. People laugh when I say that because we have inflation and economic woes, but those people think the USA is the center of the world and don’t understand the global economy and what’s going on in other countries. In the last century or so, as transportation technology has gotten increasingly more sophisticated and efficient, most of the world has enjoyed an unprecedented year around bounty…

I spent my entire life having no lasting friendships. I found few people I could connect with; people who shared my passions, and with whom I could have the intellectual conversations I craved. Then I got on the Internet and everything changed. I found several forums that aligned with my interests, met people who were like me in many ways, people who were smarter than me about many things, which I liked, because I could learn from them. Many of the people I became online friends with were pretty wonderful Christians. Then Facebook came along, and I began hanging out there, along with a few hundred people who followed me…