August 27—This summer France has offered a vibrant window into the very different nature of Europe's parliamentary democracies as against America's presidential system. When French president, centrist social democrat Emmanuel Macron, called "snap" parliamentary elections in June, hoping to shore up his support in what the French call the "hemicycle" (their parliamentary chamber), the biggest winner, with 31 percent of the vote, was a coalition of Left parties going by the name "National Popular Front." This grouping is now demanding that Macron appoint their chosen leader, Lucie Castets, as prime minister; but Macron argues that any government including "France Unbowed," a far-left party advocating socialism, will immediately fall in the face of widespread opposition from other parties. The result: a stalemate with no egress immediately apparent. TSD's take: Macron is right to refuse the National Popular Front's demands. With only 31 percent of the electorate backing their slate, their claims of a broad mandate from the French people are not supportable.

August 29—An article in this week's New York Times asks the arresting question: "What will we do with our free energy?" Reporting a technological improvement curve that has seen an 80 percent increase in installed solar in just one year, columnist David Wallace-Wells quotes a Bloomberg analyst as saying, "By just 2030, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free [emphasis TSD] during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year "pretty much everywhere." Riding the wave ot the future, the Biden administration this week designated 31 million acres of federal lands, all in western states, as having "high solar potential," offering priority permitting for everything from solar farms to transmission lines. Meanwhile the Trump campaign doubled down on more carbon and more global warming, promising to gut anti-pollution rules established by the Biden team and speed approvals of coal-burning power plants.

August 26—TSD has been reporting for some time on a national crisis that should be more prominent in a news cycle in which Trump's latest outrage or the grievance du jour can suck all oxygen out of the public discourse atmosphere. The purchase price of housing has increased 50 percent since 2019 while rents have seen a 35 percent hike. Added to 20 percent inflation on groceries and other household expenses, working people have seen their buying power erode dramatically, a situation contrary to any concept of social justice. The Harris campaign has released a plan to make housing more accessible, the key elements of which are tax incentives for developers of affordable housing units and a $25,000 credit for first-time buyers. Many economists caution, a New York Times column reports, that if subsidies to buyers outpace the building of more units, the result will simply be a further increase in prices. For more insight into this deplorable breakdown of social democracy, see this New York Times piece about how one city, Kalamazoo, Michigan, has fared.

August 26—Do you fear that children and adolescents spend too much time staring at phones and not enough time engaging directly with their fellow human beings and with the wider bricks and mortar (and trees and grass) world around them? This AP News article takes a look at how schools across the nation are fighting to wrest students' attention from devices and re-engage them in learning, extra-curricula activities and one another. 

August 24—Speaking at the Federal Reserve Board's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, WY, Fed Chairmen Jerome Powell has indicated that the central bank, critical to everything from employment to inflation and buying power, will begin to cut pandemic-era high interest rates, expressing confidence that inflation is returning to the Fed's two percent target level.

August 24—JFL and RFK are rolling over in their graves: Social democratic standard-bearer Robert Kennedy's son and namesake, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has ended his bid for the presidency and endorsed Donald Trump, thus confirming what we knew all along: he "cray." It is yet unclear how the shrinking of the candidate pool will affect the contest between Harris and Trump.

August 23—It's official, on Thursday Vice President Kamala Harris officially accepted her party's nomination for president of the United States. Meanwhile Harris is releasing the occasional policy statement: most recently, Harris has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from its current 21 percent to 28 percent; in addition, as reported in the New York Times, she proposes raising the top individual marginal rate from its current 37 percent to 39.6 percent; adding a Medicare surcharge for those with more than $400,000 in annual earnings; and taxing investment gains of those earning more than $1 million per year at the income, rather than the lower capital gains rate. The TSD take: With an increasing percentage of the nation's production going to the wealthy, and many needs unmet, a significant reset is in order, and Harris's proposals are a step in the right direction.

August 16—Vice President Kamala Harris has begun to give voters an idea of where a Harris administration might try to take economic policy in a speech in North Carolina. Chief among Harris's proposals are an expanded child tax credit, with $6,000 for new babies; measures to address the nation's housing crisis, including incentives for builders and a $25,000 credit for first-time buyers; and a pledge to address inflation by going after "price-gouging" by companies who took advantage of pandemic-era bottlenecks to rake in record profit margins.  AP offers a fact check here.

August 16—The Biden Administration has negotiated lower prices for 10 of Medicare's costliest prescription medicines. The new rates are expected to save taxpayers billions of dollars.

August 16—TSD has been reporting on the nation's housing crisis, with grossly inflated purchase and rental prices making shelter unaffordable for a growing portion of Americans. One of the chief culprits: lack of supply. This New York Times article looks at a plan just approved by the New York City Council to allow construction of 7,000 new multi-family units in the Bronx, a small down payment on Mayor Eric Adams' goal to add 100,000 dwellings to the city's housing stock by 2030.

August 13—When billionaires can blanket the airwaves with unlimited funds spent on political advertising or, like Elon Musk, acquire a major social media platform to push their views, while the average voter's scope of action is limited to talking to friends and acquaintances, is democracy really equal for all? Since the landmark Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, though U.S. election law still places strict limits on contributions directly to political campaigns, the wealthy can donate unlimited funds to campaign-associated PACs and issue advocacy groups. Two AP News articles look at Musk's use of X to promote his rightist, Trump-loving agenda and at the "school choice" crowd's flooding of local school voucher referendums with unregulated funds. The Washington Post piece offers a portrait of oil tycoon Harold Hamm, whom it describes as "Trump's point person in raising funds from the oil industry and relaying to the ex-president what the industry wants."

August 12—Have you long-ago resigned yourself to subscriptions that require you to jump through 14 hoops to cancel, or having to play an intelligence-insulting game of twenty questions before you can speak to a human being at a company you are doing business with—or worse, ending up in the dreaded phone doom-loop? The Biden administration's Federal Trade Commission has proposed new rules that will (1) require that subscriptions be as easy to cancel as they are to sign up for and (2) require that consumers can reach a real person with the push of a single phone tree selection. Social democracy is about government using its regulatory power to make sure the market works for the average citizen: this is what we're talking about!

August 10—Recent polling shows Kamala Harrris gaining ground on Donald Trump and, in the latest polls, overtaking him in crucial battlegrounds.

(1) A new Ipsos poll shows Vice President Harris with a five-point national lead over Donald Trump, with a two-point overall lead in the crucial battleground states.

(2) Poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight puts Harris at 2.1 points ahead nationally and leading in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by one to two points.

(3) A New York Times/ Siena College poll conducted between August 5 and 9 has Harris beating Trump by three or four-point margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.

August 8—There are several ways for social democracies to achieve universal health coverage. One of those—that chosen by Britain in the 1950s—is the "single-payer" model, where the government directly provides everything from hospital services to doctors. The NHS (National Health Service) has been under increasing strain, as years of underfunding under Tory governments has starved the system of needed resources. General practicioners, who have seen their workloads increase dramatically, have for the first time in 60 years decided to strike, with more than 98 percent of members supporting the labor action. Keir Starmer's newly elected Labour government has promised to recruit 1,000 new GPs as an "emergency measure," but putting the NHS on a better footing for the long haul will be a major challenge for British social democracy.

August 8—Towns and cities across the United Kingdom have been roiled over the last week by riots staged by anti-immigrant groups after several children were stabbed, three fatally, by a British citizen of Rwandan extraction. Fake news stories claiming that the attacker was a cross-Channel Muslim asylum seeker were widely circulated by far-right news sites and agitators, fanning the flames of violence. This early challenge to the UK's newly elected Labour government is also a reminder that the stresses being experienced by globallization and immigration are not a phenomenon unique to the U.S. but are being felt throughout the Western World.