Editorial Roundup: United States
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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July 28
The Washington Post on RFK Jr.’s proposed limit on pharmaceutical ads
Since stepping into the helm at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done his best to challenge traditional medicine. He has loosened vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women, peddled baseless claims about the causes of chronic diseases, and championed alternative therapies such as “ healing farms.”
Now, he is considering two proposals that would make it much more difficult for companies to air television advertisements promoting their drugs to consumers. One would require that ads include longer warnings about side effects, making them more expensive to run. The other would prevent drug companies from deducting advertising costs as business expenses for tax purposes.
At first glance, Kennedy’s approach might seem like a rare win. Fewer drug advertisements should please the anti-pharma crusaders, who think people take too many pills they don’t need. But believers in mainstream medicine might welcome the change too: Drug ads are annoying, unwelcome interruptions to Sunday night football or your favorite TV show.
Alas, while drug ads might be irritating to watch, they actually help keep our country healthy. As economists Abby Alpert, Neeraj Sood and Darius Lakdawalla explained in a 2023 paper, direct-to-consumer advertising — marketing that targets consumers, as opposed to physicians, informs people about undiagnosed chronic conditions, prompts them to visit their doctors and encourages them to start treatment for their ailments. A 10 percent increase in advertising views leads to a 5.4 percent increase in the total number of prescriptions filled for advertised drugs, the researchers found.
Importantly, about 70 percent of those new prescriptions come from people who are initiating treatment for the first time. That means advertising incentivizes people to get diagnosed — a big deal. Millions of Americans live with untreated chronic conditions, often because they don’t realize they’re sick or don’t think their symptoms warrant a doctor’s visit. So nudging them into the health care system can improve overall welfare.
Industry critics are not wrong that many Americans take more medications than they need, putting them at risk of harmful side effects. But limiting consumers’ access to drug information is not the right solution. Physicians should talk with patients before writing prescriptions to make sure the additional drug is worth the potential risk.
Some critics contend that direct-to-consumer drug advertising induces consumers to buy branded drugs rather than cheaper generic alternatives, leading patients to waste money on expensive branded drugs without receiving additional health benefits. But the data tell a different story. Rather than encouraging patients to switch from their existing medication to a branded substitute, research shows that direct-to-consumer advertising increases sales for both the advertised drug and its generic competitors. In other words, drug ads boost sales for the drug category as a whole, not just the specific brand being promoted.
Consider Lipitor, a brand-name drug used to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease. Yes, ads for the medication caused more consumers to start taking Lipitor, but it also increased demand for the generic version of Zocor — a competitor. That suggests the ads prompted people to visit their doctors, who often recommended the more affordable generic instead of the costly branded drug.
As a result, Kennedy’s proposals — which would likely lead to a sharp drop in direct-to-consumer advertising — could reduce overall welfare. Limiting advertising would discourage patients who genuinely need the branded drugs from seeking treatment. It would also cut into sales of other unadvertised drugs that benefit from the increased awareness that ads for their competitors create.
For Kennedy’s faithful supporters, perhaps that’s the point. A key theme of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” platform is to reduce America’s reliance on drugs in favor of more natural (if less effective) solutions. But, for everyone else, particularly those living with undiagnosed conditions, the policies would be a step backward. Drug advertising makes America more healthy, not less.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/28/drug-pharmaceutical-advertising-maha-healthcare/
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July 28
The New York Times on says SCOTUS owes the U.S. explanations, not just rulings
Federal judges are not elected by the public. Nor are they supposed to make decisions based on their ideological preferences. Our political system instead vests them with the power to decide whether the president, Congress and other lawmakers are enacting policies that are consistent with previous laws, court rulings and, above all, the Constitution.
For these reasons, the credibility of judges depends on their ability to offer public explanation for the legal basis of their decisions. When judges show their work, the public can assess it by the standards the judiciary sets for itself — reasoning grounded in law and judicial precedent. Without that, judges risk their legitimacy. Clear explanation is especially important for the Supreme Court, which sets national rules that lower courts must follow. When the court fails to make these rules clear, confusion can set in.
The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this docket (also known as the shadow docket), the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.
In following this path, the justices are ducking one of their crucial responsibilities: making persuasive arguments with which we can all engage. This overuse of the emergency docket is a self-inflicted wound. It diminishes public confidence in government when that confidence is already low.
We recognize that the emergency docket is a necessary part of Supreme Court business. It allows the court to address urgent questions that cannot wait months or years to be adjudicated to the end in the lower courts and then fully briefed and argued at the Supreme Court.
For most of American history, a single justice ruled on emergency matters, sometimes after a hearing, with each of the nine justices having authority over a different region. After the court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, all nine heard last-minute applications to delay executions. The practice of the full court hearing emergency cases became routine in the early 1980s, according to Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor who tracks the court in a weekly newsletter. Still, the death penalty was long the emergency docket’s primary purpose. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, combined, asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief only eight times in 16 years.
Mr. Trump’s administration has been much more aggressive about seeking emergency relief for a worrisome reason: He has enacted many legally dubious policies that lower-court judges have blocked, on a strikingly bipartisan basis. His lawyers have then selectively rushed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn certain rulings and allow the policies to go into effect. In his first term, his administration applied for emergency relief 41 times. In his second term, the pace has been even faster. The Trump administration has applied 21 times since January. The math is jarring. Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama averaged one emergency request every two years; Mr. Trump averages nearly one a week.
The justices have been very friendly to these applications. After rejecting the Trump administration’s first three filings this spring, the court has granted the last 18. Some of its decisions are legally defensible. Others may turn out to be temporary, with the justices ultimately judging Mr. Trump’s policy to be illegal after they fully consider it. Yet the overuse of the emergency docket nonetheless has worrisome consequences. We see at least three specific ways in which the court’s new fondness for speed and silence is damaging the American legal system.
The first problem is the lack of explanation, which leaves the public unable to assess the justices’ reasoning and lower courts and policymakers uncertain about the full meaning of the rulings.
Take the decision this month allowing the Trump administration to fire many Department of Education employees. After taking office, Mr. Trump said he would like to close the agency immediately and signed an order with a section called “Closing the Department of Education and Returning Authority to the States.” In response to lawsuits brought by states, school districts and unions, a district court blocked the order, finding that it “effectively dismantled” the department.
The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, making multiple arguments. John Sauer, Mr. Trump’s solicitor general, conceded in his petition that the executive branch could not unilaterally abolish the department, which Congress created in 1979. But Mr. Sauer defended the order by saying that it directed closure to the “maximum extent” permitted by law. He also argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing (meaning they did not have a legal basis to challenge the order) and that the lower court lacked jurisdiction (meaning it was not the right forum for the case).
The court sided with the Trump administration, offering no explanation. It did not say whether it agreed with Mr. Sauer’s argument on the merits or his arguments about standing or jurisdiction. It did not illuminate what it would mean to close a cabinet agency to the maximum extent permissible without actually closing it. As a result, lower courts cannot know how to apply the ruling in other cases. Which firings and cuts are legal, and which are illegal? Should other plaintiffs file a new lawsuit? The court gave no clue. Uncertainties also loom over its emergency rulings on cases dealing with immigration, transgender troops and access to Social Security records.
A second problem is the perception of Supreme Court partisanship, which the emergency docket exacerbates. Since 2021, the approval rating for the court has fallen, and people’s attitudes toward it have become more polarized, with many more Republicans than Democrats or independents expressing faith in it. As the court’s Republican-appointed majority rules again and again in Mr. Trump’s favor in emergency matters, the paucity of explanation contributes to a perception that the justices have a thumb on the scale for a Republican president.
It is also striking that the court seemed less willing to grant emergency relief to President Joe Biden than to Mr. Trump. In 2022, for example, the Biden administration petitioned the justices after a district court blocked the Education Department from carrying out Mr. Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program. The justices declined to act, leaving his plan paused for half a year while they considered the case on its normal, slower docket. The justices also declined to take up his administration’s broader complaints about universal injunctions — orders from a single lower-court judge blocking a policy nationwide, as happened with the debt-relief program.
After Mr. Trump took office, by contrast, the justices issued a ruling restricting those universal injunctions. Why was Trump’s Education Department policy an emergency that required immediate relief but Biden’s policy was not? Why did the court allow universal injunctions to block Mr. Biden’s policies, only to restrict them after they blocked Mr. Trump’s actions? Once more, the justices might have had reasons for making these distinctions but have not offered them. By failing to do so, the justices breed doubt.
Another recent emergency case highlighted this partisanship problem in a subtler way. In May the court expanded the president’s authority to remove officials at independent agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board. This time, the court gave a truncated explanation, saying the president’s constitutional powers include the authority to fire agency heads without cause. But the court made a strange exception. It said the president still must have cause to fire a member of the board of the Federal Reserve. In defense, the court offered one vague sentence: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
The lack of meaningful argument arouses suspicion that the distinction has little legal basis and instead reflects the fact that many Republicans favor a well-functioning Fed while being suspicious of other regulatory agencies. Because of the court’s ruling, the president can now dismiss many agency leaders at will; on Wednesday the conservative majority issued yet another emergency order that allows Mr. Trump to fire the Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. These rulings are a sharp break from a previous Supreme Court decision that stood for 90 years, and they end the independence that some agencies had since Congress created them during the New Deal. The court is using the emergency docket to create a more powerful presidency.
The third problem is that the Supreme Court is using this docket to make itself more powerful, too, deciding many of the country’s most pressing political questions in real time. This is a power grab, in which the justices reduce the role of lower courts, where judges are more evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees than the justices are.
Last month Justice Brett Kavanaugh invited yet more applications for emergency relief. He wrote that the Supreme Court, not the lower courts, should decide whether a major law or executive action takes effect in the months or years before a final judgment. There are benefits to national uniformity, which Mr. Kavanaugh said is his goal. But the six Republican appointees on the nine-member court sometimes seem to favor a version of uniformity that reflects their personal policy preferences.
Since Mr. Trump first took office in 2017, the Supreme Court has restrained him in important ways. It blocked major policies in his first term, such as his attempt to add a citizenship question to the census. It showed no patience for his ludicrous claims of election fraud in 2020. This year it issued an emergency order prohibiting the transfer of additional prisoners to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Anybody who dismisses the court as a mere extension of Mr. Trump is being unfair.
Nonetheless, the court has been too deferential to him. It sometimes seemed willfully blind to the ways in which he is different from every other modern president, of either party, in arrogating power and breaking with longstanding legal and ethical constraints on using it. Last summer the justices gave him and future presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for most of their acts in office, a free pass that set aside the principle that no one is above the law. By using the emergency docket to side with him so often, the court is changing its own job and the presidency before our eyes when the country needs the Supreme Court to be a force of stability.
A better approach would be for the court to adhere to stricter standards for deciding which cases are true emergencies. Even in these cases, the justices should hold arguments when possible and always publicly release their votes. They should take the time to explain themselves clearly enough to guide the lower courts, give the rest of us a rationale and distinguish judicial power from political power.
Most of all, the court should think about how its work can bolster the separation of powers to assure the future of American democracy. That is its ultimate responsibility.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/supreme-court-emergency-rulings.html
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July 25
The Wall Street Journal says while Trump’s policies are helping Wall Street, Main Street is suffering
If financial conditions are restrictive, Wall Street sure hasn’t noticed. Stock indexes hit fresh records this week, and speculative meme stocks are back to mania levels. Meanwhile, smaller businesses in the non-financial economy are tightening their belts amid uncertainty over tariffs and the labor market.
Trump officials like to say their policies are focused on helping Main Street, not Wall Street. “Wall Street has done very well over the past few decades, and now it is Main Street’s turn to shine,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month. In case he hasn’t noticed, Wall Street is doing great, Main Street not so much.
President’s Trump’s whipsawing tariffs have increased volatility in equities, fixed-income and commodity markets along with foreign exchange rates. Such fluctuations make it harder for businesses to invest and may mean they have to pay more to hedge financial risks. But the volatility has been a gold mine for Wall Street trading desks.
Financial industry news site Investment Executive reported this week that the largest U.S. investment banks recorded a 17% aggregate increase in trading revenues in the second quarter compared to the same period last year. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley reported more than a 20% increase in equities trading revenue. Talk about springtime for bankers.
Mr. Trump’s semi-tariff reprieve with Japan seems to have prompted investors to double down on the TACO trade—Trump Always Chickens Out—and sent the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to new highs. The price-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 is close to record levels, which suggests that valuations may be stretched.
Look no further than so-called meme stocks, which are experiencing a mania a la early 2021. As then, retail traders are making leveraged bets on stocks that have large short-interest plays such as Kohl’s, GoPro, Opendoor and Krispy Kreme. Hedge funds are riding the stock-market roller coaster to riches, and day traders want in on the fun.
Meantime, Bitcoin is approaching $120,000, which is up some 25% this year and 80% in the past 12 months. Junk bond spreads relative to Treasurys have shrunk and are close to what they were during the dot-com bubble. Smaller spreads often result from looser financial conditions as demand increases for riskier assets.
None of this signals that there’s a shortage of liquidity, or that current interest rates are restricting credit conditions. Yet back on Main Street, businesses are struggling to borrow. Bank construction loans and housing starts have declined. Job growth has stalled in recent months in most industries outside of healthcare and government.
Tariffs are squeezing margins at many small and medium-sized businesses, which can’t absorb their costs or reconfigure supply chains as easily as the big guys. The Labor Department’s latest JOLTS survey showed hiring declined this spring for employers with fewer than 50 workers while modestly increasing for those with more than 1,000. The mass deportation crackdown has also reduced the available workforce for smaller employers.
Mr. Trump wants the Federal Reserve to cut rates next week, but it’s no easy call when financial conditions are this loose and inflation is still above the Fed’s target. If the new tax bill is as pro-growth as the White House says, that should help the Main Street economy as much as Wall Street. But that also isn’t an argument for cutting rates.
If Mr. Trump wants more prosperity for the little guy, he’d worry less about cutting rates for Wall Street and more about easing his tariff and deportation campaigns for Main Street.
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July 24
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says proposed renaming of Kennedy Center would tarnish the cultural jewel
Arose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespeare, but the Orwellian name games played by our current president and his congressional lackeys truly stink. The latest: A Missouri congressman has filed legislation to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after Dear Leader, er, President Donald Trump.
The Kennedy Center, long a jewel of Washington, D.C., culture, has become an odd obsession of Trump’s lately. After breaking with tradition by refusing during his first term to even attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors awards ceremony, Trump in this term has already staged a takeover, ousting its leaders and board members that were appointed under the Biden administration and making himself chairman.
Channeling his inner Mussolini, Trump has declared that the Center’s programming must adhere to his narrow version of pro-American entertainment, which has gone over with its patrons and performers about as well as you’d expect. Ticket sales have plummeted. Performance boycotts have included a withdrawal by the acclaimed musical “ Hamilton.” (The show’s multicultural cast celebrates the Constitution, immigration and the struggle for equality, and ridicules monarchy and oppression — so, obviously, Trump is on record as disliking it.)
In sycophantic fealty to Trump’s new Kennedy Center obsession, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday advanced a measure to rename the Opera House within the Center after First Lady Melania Trump. Rep. Chillie Pingree, D-Maine, noting President Trump’s escalating obsession with the topic, mused to The New York Times: “(D)oes the president plan to rename the whole Kennedy Center after himself?”
It took exactly one day for Rep. Bob Onder to turn that facetious suggestion into putatively serious legislation.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Joe Holleman reports, the Lake Saint Louis Republican on Wednesday filed what he’s calling the “Make Entertainment Great Again” Act, renaming the entire Center for Trump himself on the rationale that the former reality TV hack has long been “a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape.”
Why stop there, Rep. Onder? As long as you’re in full lickspittle mode, why not just follow the lead of the late dictator of Turkmenistan and rename the days of the week after Trump and his family?
Why does any of this matter? As Shakespeare asked, What’s in a name?
Plenty. It matters because randomly renaming cultural institutions to promote a political movement that’s opposed by half the country — and, in particular, renaming things for the sitting leader of that movement — is what dictatorships do.
Trump himself understands and embraces this. It’s why he’s currently pressing the NFL’s Washington Commanders to revert to their controversial previous name, the Redskins. It’s why he has ordered the military to restore previously scrubbed Confederate names to its installations, reembracing the bizarre tradition of formally honoring what were, quite literally, enemy combatants against the United States.
It’s why Trump took it upon himself, without apparent authority, to declare that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. And it’s why he has barred The Associated Press from presidential coverage for refusing to recast its writing standards to that absurdity — by which Trump demonstrates, not for the first time, that his deep contempt for the Constitution is more than just talk.
Why stop there, Rep. Onder? As long as you’re in full lickspittle mode, why not just follow the lead of the late dictator of Turkmenistan and rename the days of the week after Trump and his family?
Why does any of this matter? As Shakespeare asked, What’s in a name?
Plenty. It matters because randomly renaming cultural institutions to promote a political movement that’s opposed by half the country — and, in particular, renaming things for the sitting leader of that movement — is what dictatorships do.
Trump himself understands and embraces this. It’s why he’s currently pressing the NFL’s Washington Commanders to revert to their controversial previous name, the Redskins. It’s why he has ordered the military to restore previously scrubbed Confederate names to its installations, reembracing the bizarre tradition of formally honoring what were, quite literally, enemy combatants against the United States.
It’s why Trump took it upon himself, without apparent authority, to declare that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. And it’s why he has barred The Associated Press from presidential coverage for refusing to recast its writing standards to that absurdity — by which Trump demonstrates, not for the first time, that his deep contempt for the Constitution is more than just talk.
ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_73f7daae-67f9-4f8f-9de2-665fd537f460.html
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July 24
The Guardian on global wealth inequality
his year’s global wealth report by the City bank UBS confirms what is self-evident but rarely confronted: while riches are accumulating, their distribution remains starkly unbalanced. In the 56 countries and economic areas surveyed, the report says global personal wealth grew 4.6% in 2024. However, not all boats have been lifted by this tide. The gap is growing between those who hold assets and those who don’t.
The figures are shocking: just 60m of the world’s adults – 1.6% of the population – have net personal wealth of $226tn, or 48.1% of all the world’s riches. At the other extreme, four in 10 adults – 1.57bn people – have only $2.7tn, or just 0.6% of all the world’s personal wealth. Economists now argue that inequality is no longer a by-product of growth but a condition of it.
In the US, soaring bond markets and tech stocks have benefited the ultra-rich and deepened inequality. Nine households, it was reported, control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley. By contrast, UBS says British median wealth rose while average wealth fell. This is a rare divergence, probably caused by prosperous households in London taking a hit from interest rate hikes as house prices dropped and debt costs rose. This wasn’t a sign of shared prosperity but of paper losses at the top, while ordinary workers held steady.
Unlike wages, wealth reflects not just income but also access to assets, favourable institutional conditions – such as low interest rates – and public policies like low taxes and housing shortages. In other words, wealth depends on political choices in ways that income currently does not. It’s not just the inequality itself that is the issue but the erosion of mechanisms that once constrained it. As the report notes, wealth and income inequality are linked. But where wages have stagnated and collective bargaining has weakened, capital income – derived from profits, rents and interest – has been boosted by design. Productivity gains, once expected to feed through to broader living standards, now primarily serve to enhance returns to wealth.
Taxes on wealth are necessary to make societies more equal. Unfairness is aiding far-right autocrats whose rise brings the risk of democratic collapse. In July seven Nobel laureates issued a powerful call for a minimum tax on the ultra-rich. Brazil, Spain and South Africa have demanded a global tax on the super-rich, placing the issue on the G20 agenda. Pioneering work by economists such as Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez led to the French national assembly passing a law this year for a 2% minimum tax on wealth over €100m. The legislation, regrettably, has not proceeded past the senate.
Progressive taxation is necessary, but it doesn’t address a core problem in many economies: when capital income outpaces labour income, redistribution may ease the symptoms of neoliberalism, but it leaves the underlying condition untreated. High inequality suppresses consumption, deters investment and slows growth. The gap between rich and poor is not just unfair – it’s economically unsustainable. Without strong domestic demand, economies increasingly rely on debt, speculation and asset bubbles to fuel growth.
Changing this would take more than fiscal transfers. It would require policies that boost wages: full employment, stronger labour unions and public investment. Private ownership itself may need to be reconceived – less perhaps in the sense of expropriation, and more in terms of widening access to productive assets and social wealth.
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