OCTOBER 18, 2026 – If you think the election results next month will solve all our difficulties, look no further than France. Our deepest problems aren’t unique to the United States, and they won’t be “solved” simply by throwing out the current batch of rascals and replacing them with a different batch of rascals.
What lessons can we divine from events in France? Three universal lessons, political and economic. First, one fundamental demographic reality can’t be avoided: as a population ages, so does the total cost of providing healthcare for the aging cohort become a larger society-wide financial burden, as the capacity to pay those costs diminishes among younger folks. Second, whether the concern is one city’s ancient sewer system or another community’s crumbling schools or yet another area’s underfunded police training, to remedy the issue, the immutable law of cost is, “Pay now or pay a lot more later.” Third, the best way to accelerate the prospects of an unwelcome political extreme is to support the fortunes of its opposing extreme.
To view the rioting in France and respond with a wagging finger and a “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” is to be dangerously dismissive of related viral strains in our own political and economic systems, against which strains we have no reliable immunity.
One fundamental economic problem faced by France is the size of its public debt and annual deficit relative to the country’s productivity, id est, its GDP: France’s sovereign debt is now 119% of GDP, and its current budgetary deficit is running 5.25% of GDP. “Tsk, tsk,” but America’s percentages are 126% and 6.0% respectively.
Another parallel between France and the U.S. (and elsewhere!) is the essential driver of the current civil unrest in France: affordability. The immediate focus is education; dilapidated schools, class sizes, teacher salaries, and no room to finance increased expenditures in these areas of neglect. Compounding the problem is the cost of supporting France’s generous support of pensioners—starting at the age of 62. Ultimately, the issue boils down to generating enough distributive income to cover the costs of living: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, daycare, and the big one . . . health care . . . as aggravated by inflation, by all its causes, not simply government borrowing and deficit spending.
In America, apart from corruption (!), the biggest issue on the mid-term ballot is . . . the cost of living. What’s not on the ballot—but should be on the mind of every candidate and every voter—is how we will pay for years of neglect of our infrastructure and marginalized members of society, on top of funding current operating demands and requirements.
Stalking us in the background, of course, are the staggering potential costs of adjusting to climate change, let alone the costs of slowing its anthropogenic causes.
And yet, we have a Secretary of Defense who possesses the steroidal testosterone to call himself the Secretary of WAR, asking Congress to fund a military budget of $1.5 trillion. And we have a Republican party hell-bent on cutting taxes at every turn without any empirical proof that doing so would increase GDP (or be structured equitably so as to reduce, not increase, the growing and destabilizing disparity of wealth and income in America). Meanwhile, waste, fraud, abuse . . . and GRIFT . . . among the president, his family, and his cronies make a mockery of the looming insolvency of the social security system and the need for serious, competent leadership to address it.
France is on the precipice of more chaos, both political and economic. Before we Americans, from an ostensibly safe distance, condemn the violence “over there” and blame them for their profligacies and can-kicking ways, we need to examine our own state of affairs. To avoid what France is now experiencing, we must take four critical steps, pretty much as of yesterday:
FIRST: End the war against Iran and Trump’s political and economic vandalism enabled and supported by the Republican Party.
SECOND: Conduct emergency repairs—(a) provide safety nets to the most vulnerable of our society, leading with stop-gap measures in healthcare and health insurance; (b) restore the viability and integrity of our public institutions, starting with the DOJ, the Department of HHS (specifically, the NIH and CDC), and de-politicize research grants to institutions of higher learning; and (c) rehabilitate healthy relationships with our strategic allies and most critical trading partners. THIRD: Develop, explain (for buy-in), and implement (effectively, competently) long-term policy solutions for our most pressing national issues.
To advance the foregoing imperatives, we must vote a straight Democratic ticket—not because all Democrats are exceptional, but because (a) in the current era, any candidate running as a Republican has implicitly if not explicitly hitched their wagon to the most dangerous and destructive political cult ever visited upon our country; and (b) abstention from voting or voting for any third party candidate is a vote for the Republican. Yet the work doesn’t end with our votes; it begins with them.
Whew! I’ll now step down from the soap box—but I’m leaving it firmly in place for future rants. Stay tuned, but whatever else you do, vote . . . Democrat and vote early—in person.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
