Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Aug. 10
The Washington Post says America’s budget is on the precipice of catastrophe
The budget of the federal government is the largest of any organization in human history. It’s larger than the entire economy of every foreign country except China. And it mostly grows automatically, without regular input from elected officials.
In the past, huge surges in the national debt were largely caused by wars or recessions. They were temporary. When the war concluded or economic growth resumed, debt as a share of the economy would fall.
That’s not how it works anymore. The debt increases due to demographic trends as the bulk of spending goes to programs that serve an aging population. The budget deficit as a share of the economy in 2025, during a peacetime expansion, was larger than any year of the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression.
Around 2030, the United States is projected to surpass three milestones that illustrate the lack of precedent for the government’s fiscal predicament.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, 2030 is the year when federal debt held by the public as a share of the economy will exceed the record set by World War II. Unlike in the ’40s, this debt shows no signs of ever declining.
In 1945, 84 percent of federal outlays were on defense, a tsunami of spending that would ebb once World War II concluded. In 2025, 73 percent of federal outlays were on mandatory spending or interest payments, which are legally obligated to continue.
The year 2030 is also roughly when the ratio of seniors to the total population will reach 1 in 5. As recently as 2008, the ratio was around 1 in 8. Seniors’ rising share of the population mechanically raises Social Security and Medicare costs and pushes them onto a proportionally smaller working population.
In 1952, there were six people between ages 25 and 64 for every one person 65 or older. That meant there were six people whose wages could be taxed to pay for benefits for every one senior. In 2011, there were four. Today, there are 2.7.
The U.S. always used to be able to count on a naturally rising population as an engine for economic growth, but that will no longer be the case. The only source of population growth after 2030 will be immigration.
That’s because 2030 is also the year when the CBO projects that deaths will begin to exceed births. The entitlement programs making up much of the budget were designed under 20th-century demographic expectations that no longer hold true.
Social Security used to take in more money than it gave out, but that money was spent on other things. The program has run annual deficits since 2010. It is projected to go insolvent in 2032, at which point seniors would receive a roughly one-quarter cut in benefits across the board.
Medicare’s budget-busting makes Social Security’s look modest by comparison. Of the projected $138 trillion budget shortfall over the next 30 years, $109 trillion is from Medicare. Rising health care costs, combined with an aging population receiving far more in benefits than it ever paid in taxes, spells fiscal Armageddon. The Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund goes insolvent in 2033.
The fiscal challenges scheduled to arrive in the 2030s are actually based on optimistic assumptions. They are from the CBO’s baseline estimates, which assume no wars, no recessions, low and stable inflation and no new government programs or tax changes.
Imagine how much worse the debt will look when there is a recession. If, heaven forbid, the U.S. needs to boost defense spending for a protracted war, it doesn’t have much room to grow.
Starting with World War II levels of debt and exceeding Great Depression levels of annual deficits, the U.S. is not prepared to face the demographic-induced challenges that loom, let alone world events nobody can predict.
Budget hawks have been talking for years about many of these problems, and it may have felt like not much has happened. The federal budget has been able to withstand more than many expected. But the 2030s is when the bill comes due.
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Aug. 6
The Wall Street Journal calls for the streamlining of the FDA’s bureaucratic processes
Good news strikes from an unlikely source. On Thursday the Food and Drug Administration approved Replimune’s immunotherapy for metastatic melanoma, a day after it green-lighted mFlusiva, Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine. The shame is that both might have been available sooner but for regulatory delays, which hurt both patients and American innovation.
Replimune has been working on its RP1 immunotherapy for a decade but got caught in the FDA cross-hairs at the last stretch. FDA review staff recommended approval after its late-stage trial showed that a third of patients whose disease had worsened on other immunotherapies went into remission. Yet Vinay Prasad, the former biologics and vaccine chief, deep-sixed RP1 last summer.
The White House gave Dr. Prasad the boot by this spring—in large part because of his hostility to new treatments—but the bureaucrats who shared his views then tried to block RP1’s approval again. Fortunately, an advisory committee of outside scientists and doctors last week backed approval, and the FDA’s new leaders have heeded.
Ditto for Moderna’s flu vaccine, which was unanimously supported by an advisory panel in June. In a large randomized trial of patients over age 50, Moderna’s vaccine was 27% more effective at preventing symptomatic flu and 50% against hospitalization, compared with a standard shot. Flu shots are typically only about 40% effective, and even modest improvement on that could reduce hospitalizations by tens of thousands a year.
One shortcoming of existing flu shots is that the immune response wanes after a couple of months. Moderna’s vaccine elicits more durable immunity, so it should confer better protection as the winter drags on. The mRNA platform also accelerates vaccine manufacturing, which could greatly reduce the lead time required for selecting flu strains.
Scientists currently do their best in early March to choose strains to target for the following flu season. This lag sometimes results in a mismatch between manufactured shots and the flu strains that end up circulating, and the hope is that Moderna’s speedier process will allow better targeting. The main drawback is patients who received mFlusiva were likelier to report side effects, such as fatigue, muscle aches and headaches. But the FDA is right to let patients and doctors weigh the benefits against the downsides.
Contrast that with the paternalism of Dr. Prasad, who in February tried to block the review of Moderna’s application. He quibbled that the company didn’t use a high-dose flu shot as its placebo, even though the latter aren’t available in many of the European countries where its trial was conducted.
Moderna plans a follow-up study in seniors to compare mFlusiva’s efficacy with traditional high-dose vaccines, which is a reasonable compromise. Still, it’s regrettable that gaining approval took five years from when Moderna began testing its vaccine in humans, versus less than a year for Covid jabs under the first Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
Acting vaccine chief Karim Mikhail recently said early-stage trials “that may take up to two years to complete here in the United States are completed in nine months in China.” As a result, China is attracting more biotech investment. Regulatory uncertainty under the prior FDA leadership also cast a chill over the biotech industry.
The Moderna and Replimune approvals are positive signs that the new leadership may be mounting a much-needed turnaround. Dr. Mikhail recently announced several initiatives to streamline the FDA’s bureaucratic processes that slow drug development. America needs a permanent Operation Warp Speed.
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Aug. 9
The Philadelphia Inquirer says Donald Trump ignores the toll of rising prices on average Americans
With his approval ratings hovering at near record lows, President Donald Trump took a rare trip to the West Coast to convince voters not to trust their own wallets, because the economy is better than ever.
Never mind that since he took office last year, Americans have been forced to spend more on food and rent. That utility prices are soaring while Trump slashed renewable energy alternatives. Or that thanks to his tariffs, the average price of a new car jumped 10%, while his failed war in Iran boosted gas prices by more than 30%.
To borrow a phrase from the last inept White House occupant who tried to buck up the masses amid a calamity: “Trumpie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
To show hardworking Americans that the billionaire president feels their pain, Trump first attended a GOP fundraiser at a golf resort he owns in Rancho Palos Verdes, an affluent coastal city near Los Angeles, where a round of golf on the weekends can cost $800 or more. Tickets to the fundraiser ranged from $15,000 to $150,000.
From there, Trump headed to a casino in Las Vegas, where he gave a speech on the economy aimed at working families.
Nothing signals economic prosperity like the backdrop of folks mindlessly pumping money into a slot machine, or hoping to dig out of debt with the next roll of the dice — especially coming from a guy who made millions while bankrupting his now-defunct casinos in Atlantic City.
Trump’s Vegas speech was a yawning rehash of rhetoric touting the stock market (when only about half the country owns equities) and tax cuts in his costly Big Beautiful Bill, while mixing in the usual mistruths and dismissing the high prices squeezing many Americans struggling to make ends meet.
“We’re having some fake inflation because of the fuel,” he told the casino crowd.
But it was in between the two stops where Trump provided a more revealing window into how he really thinks and talks, previewing his economic message in a friendly Fox News interview rife with non sequiturs, sentence fragments, and illeisms.
“In the economy, Trump is at 42%, I shouldn’t be at, we have the greatest economy maybe in the history of the world for any country,” he said.
Fox News personality Trace Gallagher pointed out that gas prices were up 30%, and that he recently paid $6.27 for a gallon of gas in California.
Even amid the muddle, Trump had a ready response for that: shift the blame. “It’s a little different thing — because they charge taxes on gas. Every time, every time it goes down, they take taxes. I mean, they’ve done a terrible job in California.”
Trump then promised gas prices would soon be under $3 a gallon once the three major oil companies — which have been making roughly $400 million a day since the Iran war began — lowered prices.
“I think we’re going to have it coming down,” he said. “The oil companies have to start going. You know, they’re making too much money, and they’ve got to start lowering it. But we’re going to be down into the threes and maybe the twos pretty soon, per gallon.”
Gallagher then teed up a softball question so Trump could address the reason he schlepped across the country in the first place: “You’re here to talk about the economy. What’s your big message?”
“So, tariffs have been incredible. We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said, ignoring the fact the government has had to refund most of the duties, which the U.S. Supreme Court determined were improperly collected. “I think if there’s anything, I’d say our country is rocking and rolling. We’ve never been this successful.”
Well, one person in America has definitely never been this successful. As a public servant, Trump made more than $2 billion last year on a lot of murky deals.
No wonder then that by the president’s grading curve, the economy is fine. Just ask him.
“The food, groceries, it’s all coming down. We’ve done a great job,” he said. “I think we should be given an A+ on the economy.”
Voters can submit their own midterm grades on Election Day.
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Aug. 10
The Guardian says the U.S. must exert real pressure for relief to come to Gaza
At the end of July, Donald Trump announced that a “monumental” US-backed deal had been struck on Gaza, securing the phased disarmament of Hamas in parallel with Israeli military withdrawal. Three days later it was reported that another 18 people had died in Israeli airstrikes. Not for the first time, it appeared that Mr Trump’s rhetoric had only a distant relationship with the reality it purported to describe.
Such suspicions were duly confirmed yesterday. Under pressure from far-right members of his coalition, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explicitly rejected the sequencing of a 15-point plan from the increasingly hapless Board of Peace – an international body set up by the US president – and poured scorn on “a wave of rumours of … Israeli withdrawals on all fronts”. In a direct message to the White House, Mr Netanyahu stated that “we know how to stand our ground, even against our best friends when necessary.”
In practical terms that will mean the continued, brazen violation of the terms of last October’s ceasefire agreement, since when close to 1,300 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air assaults. Far from envisaging any withdrawal, the Israeli military has expanded its presence and now controls about 65% of the territory. Hemmed in towards the coast in the rest of the strip, much of the population faces an unrelenting daily struggle.
Formal schooling has not restarted, the healthcare system has been largely destroyed and the entry of medical and other humanitarian aid remains severely restricted. Reconstruction work has been blocked, while the first building contract issued by the Board of Peace has been for an outpost to host foreign troops. Meanwhile, the world’s attention has shifted to Mr Trump’s illegal and reckless war on Iran – a grievous miscalculation in which Israel’s prime minister also played his part.
In calling for complete Hamas disarmament before Israel makes a move, Mr Netanyahu is transparently playing for time. For two years he has relentlessly flattered the US president, and exploited his backing to pursue a scorched earth project of revenge following the Hamas massacre of October 7. But two months out from the first elections held since then, his priority now is appeasing the intransigent far-right forces who can keep him in power. Should Mr Netanyahu lose, he could face jail in relation to corruption charges first laid more than five years ago.
Despairing Palestinians can only hope that growing White House frustration with Mr Netanyahu’s forever wars will lead to a tipping point – one that should have been reached during the Joe Biden presidency. If he opted to use it, Mr Trump has the power to isolate the Israeli prime minister, call time on his temporising and manoeuvring, and compel a different approach. Board of Peace attempts yesterday to reassure the Israeli government over the verification process for disarming Hamas indicate that we are not close to that point.
Nevertheless, ahead of challenging midterm elections for the Republicans, pro-Israel sentiment may not be the political force that it once was. Recent polling suggests that traditionally high levels of US public sympathy with Israel are on the wane. Mr Trump has a choice: he can continue to accept being played by Israel’s prime minister, or he can exert the kind of pressure that could bring genuine relief to Gaza.
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