DEAR HARRIETTE: Recently, my only real friend at work moved away.

For more than two years now, Republicans have been predicting that President Joe Biden’s big-spending policies will crash the U.S. economy into recession. It hasn’t happened yet, although the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth – a widely accepted definition of recession – in the first and second quarters of 2022. But the economy climbed back into positive growth territory in the next quarter and has stayed there since.

All of that old and unwanted gym and sporting equipment is not only recyclable, it can make you money, too. Hand weights are made mostly from iron, and even if there are some rubberized components attached to them, those are easily removed, and the rest is recyclable.

VERO BEACH, Florida – Three-quarters of a century ago, when Joe Biden and Donald Trump were children, this state was a backwater, both the smallest in the South and the smallest east of the Mississippi, ranked in the bottom half of the states by population and by home ownership. Its six members of the House – fewer than Oklahoma – were nobodies, representing a sprawling peninsula that was basically nowhere. It had enjoyed booms (land, citrus) and busts (land, citrus) in recurring waves of dreams and dross. The University of Florida had about the same student enrollment (2,604) as Vermont’s Middlebury College has now (2,526).