May 2—Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law today a bill to provide $1 billion in Texas taxpayers' dollars to subsidize private school tuition and home schooling. In TSD's view, state financial support of private schools and home schooling undermines one of the key elements supporting a shared culture and civic unity—the public school system—further undermining our already fragile national cohesion.

May 2—The Diktraitor's regime on Friday sent its largely symbolic budget wish list to Congress, calling for $163 billion in cuts to social programs.

May 2—Senate Republicans on April 5 approved a basic budget framework enshrining both major tax cuts and unspecified spending reductions in social programs. The budget's tax cuts for the wealthy will add over $5 trillion to the nation's debt, an inconvenience Republican lawmakers are attempting to mask through accounting legerdemain.

May 2—Senate Republicans on April 30 blocked a Democratic bill that would have removed the Diktraitor's ability to single-handedly impose tariff taxes on working Americans. The Diktraitor has employed the ridiculous assertion of a national economic emergency as justification for imposing the levies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

May 2—Two clear-sighted federal judges have challenged the Diktraitor's vendetta campaign against law firms who have represented clients the Diktraitor does not like. On April 15 U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan blocked executive orders blackballing law firm Susman Godfrey from doing business with the federal government, opining that "the nation's founders would have viewed the orders as a shocking abuse of power." On Friday U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell joined the fight to preserve American democracy, permanently enjoining the Diktraitor's regime from persecuting law firm Perkins Coie. Characterizing the Diktraitor's actions as "unconstitutional retaliation," Howell went on to write, "No American president has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit," adding that "the action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase, 'first kill all the lawyers.'"

May 2—U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman on April 27 blocked the Diktraitor's attempt, through executive order, to strip union rights from employees at nearly a dozen federal agencies.

May 2—U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy on Apri 15 ordered the Diktraitor to release billions in green transition funds authorized under the Biden administration's signature Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021. McElroy, whom the Diktraitor appointed to the federal bench in 2017, succinctly stated what's wrong with the Diktraitor's attempts to sequester moneys appropriated by Congress:

"Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a president's agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statues passed by Congress during the previous administration."

December 13—This AP article looks at how the U.S. government's debt will limit the capacity of the Trump administration to carry out new spending initiatives, lower taxes or tackle rising prices. The national debt, now at $36 trillion, is more than seven times the federal government's 2024 revenue of $4.92 trillion. Interest alone on the debt accounts for about 20 percent of federal spending, an amount equal to the nation's budget for defense. With Republicans unwilling to raise taxes, and Democrats unwilling to give up social protections, successive governments have for decades made the tacit decision to pass revenue shortfalls on to future generations of Americans. TSD's take: the U.S. government should raise taxes, particularly on unearned income and wealth, sufficiently to pay for beneficial social democratic priorities.

December 13—As rebel groups battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad entered Damascus, and the dictator fled Syria's capital, thousands of Syrians made their way to the city's outskirts where 1,500 prisoners were trapped underground at the notorious Sednaya prison (locally known as the "human slaughterhouse"), hoping to find and rescue their loved ones. Prisoners emerging from the windowless, underground facility, with each wing specializing in a different kind of torture, were said to look like skeletons. A cautionary tale: democracy, and human rights, are precious commodities and not easily regained once lost.

December 13—As Donald Trump becomes synonymous with Republicanism, molding the GOP to his image, we are seeing some unexpected departures. This week Trump, who benefitted from no small measure of support from union workers in the recent election, offered support to East and Gulf Coast members of the International Longshoreman's Association as they prepare to fight against increasing automation—and accompanying layoffs—in upcoming contract negotiations. Of further automation on U.S. docks, the incoming president posted the following on social media: "The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers [sic]." Will the rest of the GOP follow Trump into a position supportive of union labor as against the interests of business?

December 13—TSD is watching events in Britain with keen interest as the social-democratic Labour Party, swept into office in July of this year, attempts a 180-degree turn of the British state after fourteen years of unbroken conservative governance in the UK. After a rocky start, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer is attempting to gain traction and public support with the announcement of six key mission's upon which his government will focus over the next five years. Those key missions, all reflecting key social democratic priorities, are the following: (1) Higher living standards; (2) Solving the housing crisis with 1.5 million new homes built; (3) Decreasing wait times in the National Health Service; (4) Re-establishing "beat" cops in every community to ensure public safety; (5) Increasing to 75 percent the number of five-year-olds prepared to function in first grade; (6) Energy security, climate security and afforable energy. As we suffer the Trump regime for the next four years, we American social democrats can take heart in seeing British Labour return to power after 14 years in the wilderness, and we can learn from their bold attempts (and let's hope successes to come!) to deepen social democracy in the UK.

December 13—Can you imagine functioning in an economy where prices inflate almost 13 percent every month? This has been the experience of the Argentinian people, when it has not been worse. Libertarian and Trump admirer Javier Milei won the Argentinian presidency earlier this year, running on a plank combining social conservatism and a promise to bring down inflation by any necessary means. With massive government layoffs and deep cuts to social programs, Milei has brought monthly inflation down to 2.9 percent, but at the cost of increasing those living in poverty from 40 percent to 53 percent of the population.

December 13—Political stalemate, bordering on crisis, has settled in to stay in one of the world's preeminent social democracies. In a dynamic that is echoed throughout the developed democracies of the world, centrist forces, represented by President Emmanuel Macron, are besieged by extremist parties on both the left and the right. After his party, Ensemble, showed poorly in June's EU elections, President Macron dissolved Parliament and called new elections, hoping to solidify his governing majority. Instead his party came out of the balloting weakened and outnumbered by forces both to the left and to the right. His September appointment of center-rightist Michel Jean Barnier did little to satisfy any of the French hemicycle's competing factions, and this week the far-right party National Union joined with the far-left France Unbowed (France Insoumise) to bring down Barnier's fledging government. Macron moved hastily this time to appoint a successor, centrist and political veteran Francois Bayroux, after making pledges to the center-left socialist party that he would not use the French Constitution's Article 49.3, which allows the governing party to pass legislation without submitting it to a vote.

December 13—The sharp run-up in inflation caused by Pandemic-era supply bottlenecks is generally cited as the number one reason Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in November's elections. The standard view of economists has been that an attempt to control price increases with price controls is a losing game: that such controls will do more harm than good, disincentivizing production and further exacerbating supply and demand imbalances. According to this view, if producers are truly over-charging, other suppliers will come into the market at a lower price point. But German economist Isabella Weber argues that such arguments do not apply in the case of post-pandemic inflation, where her research has shown that such necessities as groceries are controlled by only a few large suppliers, limiting competition, and that these companies used their market clout to run up prices well beyond price increases caused by supply-chain bottlenecks. Weber, who has advised the German government in applying price controls to gas and heating after Russia's invasion of Ukraine limited supplies, says that relying on higher interest rates to tame inflation not only risks increasing unemployment, but also takes too much time when people are suffering inflation-induced hardship: "If your house is on fire, you would not want to wait until the fire eventually dies out."

November 30—From the frightening (see the next News link) to the absurd, to a few that are not completely unhinged, this AP article sums up Trump's nominees at the end of November.