Saving Social Security: Lotsa Luck

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Jeff Stein at NOTUS:

A group of eight centrist senators is attempting to compel Congress to revamp Social Security, in what many in Washington see as the first real effort at overhauling the government’s biggest program in more than a decade.

The push, led by retiring Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), sets the stage for a major confrontation later this year with potential consequences for the 59 million seniors who currently receive benefits.

Their bill, the PROMISE Act, does not directly cut Social Security benefits or raise taxes to avert the program’s approaching budget shortfall. Rather, it would task a bipartisan board with writing a plan to keep the pension system funded for another 50 years, likely through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and benefit cuts. The legislation would also establish parliamentary rules aimed at pushing Congress to act on the board’s proposal.

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AARP — the roughly 40-million-members-strong seniors’ organization — has begun urging lawmakers to reject the bill, highlighting polling that suggests 85% of Americans support maintaining or increasing benefits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has begun calling for Senate Democrats to reject benefit cuts and instead stand behind financing Social Security by repealing the existing limit on payroll taxes for those earning more than $184,500 per year, arguing “the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security.”

Even conservatives who have long called for Social Security reform are mobilizing against it. Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader who leads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he has begun lobbying congressional Republican leadership to oppose the bill. Norquist called the legislation a “very real effort by the left” to convince Republicans to support tax hikes.

One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to candidly assess legislative dynamics, said, “I will eat my shoe” if the bill passes this year.

Durbin acknowledged those odds: “Miracles do occur,” he said.

In another potential sign of the legislation’s radioactivity, half of its original sponsors — Cassidy, Durbin, Tillis and Republican John Cornyn of Texas — are leaving the Senate at the end of this year. (Cassidy and Cornyn lost their primaries against Trump-backed challengers.)

Boomers Cling to Wealth and Power

Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Bruce Mehlman:

The first of the Baby Boomer generation turns 80 this year, with the fourth and likely last of the Baby Boomer Presidents well-into his second term. Leadership will eventually pass to younger generations. But Boomers still hold much of the wealth and many of the offices, and they appear in no hurry to hand things over. A brief look at generational inheritance.

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Decades of rising earnings and asset values left Baby Boomers and older Americans holding nearly two-thirds of assets. And the wealth has outlasted the traditional handoff: Americans are living and working longer, while judges, Senators, House members and CEOs are markedly older than they were a generation ago.

Older generations are also sticking around longer in government & business… the average age of judges, Senators, House members & CEOs climbed for four decades and remains at or near record highs.

GAO Confirms That DOGE Was Sketchy

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations GAO-26-108615 Published: Aug 06, 2026. Publicly Released: Aug 06, 2026.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began posting its estimated savings on a web page known as the Wall of Receipts on February 17, 2025. As of July 7, 2026, the Wall of Receipts reported savings of $110 billion across contracts, grants, and leases, but some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence. While DOGE provided some information about estimated savings, several issues limit the transparency and reliability of these reported savings.

• DOGE was not transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings. Specifically, DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate the majority of savings associated with the contracts reported as terminated. For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings. Similarly, the Wall of Receipts does not include an explanation of how the savings from terminated leases were calculated.
• The Wall of Receipts includes leases identified for termination before DOGE was established. Specifically,108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established.
• GAO’s review of selected contracts identified potential cost savings, but the basis for some reported savings is unknown. For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.

While the Wall of Receipts includes some information about the data and sources underlying reported savings, it does not sufficiently disclose limitations affecting data quality. GAO’s key practices for transparently reporting government information state that federal government websites should disclose known data quality issues and limitations.

DOGE launched the initial iteration of the Wall of Receipts in February 2025 less than a month after the entity was established in January 2025. Since the initial launch, there have been no updates on the site to shed additional light on the cost savings methodology or to disclose any data limitations. As of July 7, 2026, the web page remains live. Because U.S. DOGE Service officials did not respond to requests for information, GAO could not determine the reasons why DOGE did not disclose data quality issues and limitations when the website first went live or at any time since then. Publicly reporting government data, such as on the Wall of Receipts, can have significant value. However, conveying the methodologies used to calculate savings, as well as any data limitations on the Wall of Receipts, would provide policymakers and the public with the needed caveats to better interpret and use the information.

Solar Power

 Many posts have discussed campaign finance.

TIMOTHY CAMA and JACOB WENDLER at POLITICO:

An aggressive new PAC backed by renewable energy supporters notched a major win last night by helping unseat Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) despite President Donald Trump’s vocal support, our colleague Timothy Cama reports.

— The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is now poised to be a force in future contests after spending $2 million opposing Ogles and boosting Republican primary opponent Charlie Hatcher. Ogles was the third Republican this year to lose a race after being targeted by the super PAC, which was launched by solar executives wanting to get back at Republicans who actively work against renewables.

— The group’s ads did not mention clean energy, instead targeting conservative voters with advertisements that boosted Hatcher’s right-wing credentials and chided Ogles for missing votes. The PAC deployed a similar playbook against Texas Rep. Chip Roy in his unsuccessful attorney general bid and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost his campaign for governor.

— “The clean energy industry’s political muscle is only getting stronger and more intimidating,” said Invest in Tomorrow Coalition co-founder Michael Brune, who previously led the advocacy group the Sierra Club. “Our hope here is that clean energy will go back to being a bipartisan issue, and maybe one of the few issues that all Americans can agree on. But before we get there, we’ve got to continue our retribution tour and take out a few more members who have voted the wrong way.”

— Lawmakers like Ogles, Roy and Norman drew the ire of industry last year when they pushed Republican leaders in Congress for a quick phaseout of renewable energy incentives in what became the One Big Beautiful Bill act. Chris Larsen — the PAC’s top backer, who has contributed $6 million of its $6.8 million — has called its advocacy “political warfare.”

— The group has taken lessons learned from the crypto industry, where Larsen was the co-founder of Ripple Labs. Ripple helped fund Fairshake, a super PAC that has spent more than $200 million to unseat politicians it sees as unfriendly to the industry. Larsen also leads the environmental philanthropy Clean Break Fund with Brune.

Americans Still Support the Death Penalty

A number of posts have discussed the death penalty.

J. Baxter Oliphant and Andy Cerda at Pew:

As the Trump administration and some states seek to expand the application of the death penalty, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) now favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while nearly a third (32%) oppose it.

• 68% also see the death penalty as morally justified for those committing murder, while just 28% see it as morally wrong.
• But a 59% majority say the death penalty is not a crime deterrent; far fewer (39%) say that it is.

Overall, support for the death penalty is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago, in April 2021 – though it is roughly equal to where it was in August of 2020 (65%).

A new Pew Research Center survey of 3,554 U.S. adults conducted July 6-12, 2026, also finds:

• A majority of Americans (73%) say there is some risk an innocent person would be put to death, though a quarter say that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent this.
• About half of Americans (49%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to the death penalty for committing similar crimes – and roughly the same share (48%) say this is not the case.

Government Ownership of the Means of Production, Continued

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..."-- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Jonathan Hillman at the Council on Foreign Relations:

Washington’s latest and boldest experiment in industrial policy is a renewed willingness to take equity stakes. Since January 2025, the U.S. government has announced investments worth $27.6 billion across thirty-seven deals involving direct ownership, broadening a toolkit that has traditionally focused on grants, loans, and tax incentives. The Department of Commerce leads the way with twenty four announced deals, including taking a 10 percent stake in Intel. The Development Finance Corporation, the United States’ development bank, has pledged six equity transactions in critical minerals, energy, and infrastructure. The Department of Defense has disclosed seven deals, and the Department of Energy has participated in two.

Return to this page for the Government Deal Tracker. 

Kit Pulliam at Moneywise:

The government owning equity in private companies is unusual, to say the least. And experts say that the way the Trump administration is approaching equity could be easy to abuse.

"The federal government has powers no private shareholder possesses," said Tad DeHaven, policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in an email to Moneywise. "A government that owns the players cannot be trusted to call the game fairly."

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While it is unusual, the U.S. government holding equity in private companies has occurred before. But there's one big difference in past ownership deals compared to these new ones.

"It hasn't been normal for Washington to accumulate stakes in otherwise private companies as a routine economic policy tool," DeHaven said. He says that several administrations — including the Carter, Bush, and Obama administrations — have accumulated stakes in companies during emergencies, such as during the Great Recession or after 9/11.

"Whatever one thinks of those interventions, they were justified as emergency stabilization measures and generally intended to be unwound," DeHaven said. "The second Trump administration is doing something quite different."

Volunteering and Everyday Kindness

Many posts have discussed social capital, volunteering and civic virtue.

Stephanie Marken at Gallup:

The vast majority of U.S. youth, those aged 12 to 25, report participating in some type of formal public service or volunteering activity. But more than nine in 10 youth agree that everyday acts of kindness can be just as important as formal volunteering and say people can make a difference in their community without volunteering. Most youth report doing kind acts for others.

More than eight in 10 U.S. youth aged 12 to 25 (82%) report participating in some form of service. The most popular activities include donating goods or organizing donations (54%), environmental cleanup (35%), and volunteering at food banks or shelters (31%). More structured or civic-oriented activities are less common, ranging from volunteering at a hospital, care facility or senior center (15%) to writing letters to elected officials (13%) and participating in mission trips (8%).