Editorial Roundup: United States

Audio By Carbonatix

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

___

Dec. 23

The Washington Post on conservatism and free markets

When American conservatives abandon free-market principles, there’s no telling what follows. The Heritage Foundation has been illustrating this the past few months.

One of the largest conservative think tanks in D.C. has been bleeding talent. Three members of its board of trustees resigned. Longtime conservative movement leaders such as Chris DeMuth and Stephen Moore cut ties.

Then, on Monday, three of Heritage’s research divisions moved almost as entire units to Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the conservative group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. The heads of the legal, economics and data analysis teams at Heritage defected to AAF, and they took many of their employees with them. This nearly doubles AAF’s staff, and the organization says to expect more hires. AAF also says it has raised at least $12 million in the past two weeks to support the new staffers and the projects they will be working on.

The proximate cause of these shifts was a video in October by Heritage President Kevin Roberts defending Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of antisemitic and racist influencer Nick Fuentes. If this sounds like an esoteric reason for such upheaval, that’s because it’s not the only reason. For years now, Heritage has been straying from free-market principles it once championed, causing much consternation among scholars who genuinely believe in those ideals.

Departures are not limited to the last few months. Some, such as financial regulation expert Norbert Michel and tax policy expert Adam Michel (they’re not related), now work for libertarian organizations. Others, such as budget scholar Paul Winfree, left to found new groups. Many of Heritage’s scholars who supported free trade left sporadically over several years.

Since its founding in 1973, Heritage had supported free trade. In 1993, Heritage hailed NAFTA as the realization of Ronald Reagan’s vision, since he had negotiated the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement that preceded it and supported free trade with Mexico as well. The group continued to support free trade during Trump’s first term.

When Roberts became president in December 2021, he brought a hostile attitude to free trade and a lower opinion of free markets generally. While he talks about the need for unity among conservatives and extolls the big-tent nature of Trump’s coalition, it has long been clear that there’s more room in Roberts’ tent for populist skeptics of free markets than those who are enthusiastic about them. Monday’s mass exodus confirms that.

Many of these fellows previously reasoned that they could be more helpful to the free-market cause by holding the line within the organization than by leaving. When the day-to-day battles became more about whether they’d face consequences for posting “Nazis are bad” online than about the finer points of budget policy, this position became untenable.

Support for free markets historically has been part of the glue that held the conservative movement together. That was the conviction of conservative leaders such as William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and Heritage founder Edwin Feulner. They believed any long-term political movement needed to embrace free markets as foundational.

Monday’s most striking move might have been former attorney general Ed Meese, one of Reagan’s closest advisers as California governor and later president, throwing his full support behind the defections. AAF will now host a Meese Institute for the Rule of Law.

“Conservatives must resist the temptation to abandon their defense of free enterprise in pursuit of short-term victories,” Feulner and Pence wrote in an article together for National Affairs that ended up being Feulner’s last published work before his death in July. Heritage’s descent into chaos shows what can happen when that temptation is indulged.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/23/heritage-aan-pence-free-trade-roberts/

___

Dec. 22

The New York Times says China has a chokehold on the U.S. economy

President Trump started the year with his typical bravado as he engaged in a trade war with China. He is ending the year having largely backed down.

One reason? China has powerful leverage over the United States through rare earths. The country has built an effective monopoly over these metallic elements, which are difficult to mine and process. They are also critical to the U.S. economy and military — used to make magnets essential to a wide range of electronics, including cars, fighter jets, drones, smartphones, computers and M.R.I. machines. After Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on China, it retaliated in April with export controls on rare earths that restricted U.S. access, and it tightened those controls in October. Weeks later he folded, sharply reducing his tariffs.

Now that China has successfully squeezed the Trump administration, similar tactics in other realms are easy to imagine. China could use its chokehold on rare earths to discourage weapons sales to Taiwan, gain access to advanced Western technologies or reject American entreaties to protect intellectual property or crack down on exports of fentanyl ingredients.

Breaking China’s monopoly is crucial for America’s national security. The United States needs to develop reliable alternative sources of rare earths so that our ability to make weapons does not depend on the good will of a potential adversary. America also needs to reduce its reliance so that even in peacetime, China cannot wield its monopoly as a trump card to be played whenever the interests of the two nations diverge. (America’s vulnerability on rare earths is part of the broader security weaknesses that we described in our recent series of editorials, “Overmatched.” )

Mr. Trump is not to blame for most of the problem. Yes, his trade war was reckless. But China started to build its rare earth dominance decades ago, long before Mr. Trump became president. The good news is that the United States can, with the help of its allies, end China’s monopoly. The Trump administration has already started some of this work, but it needs to do more — and members of Congress from both parties should get involved. Protecting the country’s access to rare earths needs to be a bipartisan, long-term project.

China’s dominance over rare earths has itself been a long-term project. Its leaders recognized the importance of rare earths to the modern economy by the 1980s and began to subsidize their mining and processing through cheap bank loans and direct grants. This program built a supply chain that includes mines and refineries across Inner Mongolia, Sichuan and other regions. “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths,” the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said decades ago.

The strategy worked. Today, China mines 70 percent of the world’s rare earths. It processes an even greater share of the global supply — about 90 percent — because some other nations send their rare earths to hubs like Guangzhou.

Rare earths are elements found in trace amounts in rocks. Extracting them is a difficult process that requires advanced chemical engineering. Chinese manufacturers learned these skills through years of trial and error and repeated their successes in the processing stages, which are necessary to make rare earths economically useful. During those years, American capabilities atrophied. Allowing China to obtain a chokehold is another example of the shortsighted ways that presidents from both parties fostered the rise of America’s biggest foreign challenger.

One advantage for China has been its tolerance for pollution. Mining leads to air and water contamination, and the refinement process produces toxic waste. China’s leaders have tolerated much higher levels of pollution than leaders of wealthier countries, which was one reason the United States and its allies were willing to let China take the burden of producing rare earths.

Still, the United States and its allies have the ability to change course and build up their rare earth capabilities. For one thing, the name “rare earths” is somewhat misleading. They are not so rare. China has the world’s largest known reserves partly because it has looked for these minerals more than anyone else. Many nations, including the United States, probably have their own caches of rare earths. This month an American company announced it had discovered a large deposit of the minerals in Utah.

Japan’s experience is illustrative. In 2010, China cut off exports to Japan over a maritime dispute. Japan responded by importing more rare earths from Australia in the short term and starting to build its own capabilities for the future. “Tokyo has since quietly stitched together a supply chain that is considerably less dependent on China,” The Times recently reported. Today Japan relies on China for 60 percent of these resources — still too high, but low enough that Japan has options if Beijing restricts access again.

Japan’s investment program depends on government subsidies, and any successful American program will, too. Without federal support, it would not be profitable for private companies to make the huge investments needed to mine and process rare earths and then to compete on the world market with China’s heavily subsidized products. But there is nothing unusual about the American government subsidizing industries that are crucial to national security. Since World War II, Washington has underwritten radar, aviation, satellites, semiconductors and the early internet. The payoffs were enormous.

The Trump administration has started taking steps in this direction. It has invested in mines and refineries, sometimes by buying federal stakes in the companies involved. It has also signed trade deals for rare earth mining and refining with other countries, including Australia, Japan and Saudi Arabia. The long-term solution should start with an all-of-the-above strategy that includes building up capabilities in the United States and in allied nations, as well as financing research into potential alternatives to rare earths. Some automakers have started doing this research.

These efforts are welcome yet insufficient. We urge members of Congress from both parties to begin writing legislation that can expand the country’s rare earth capabilities. This legislation needs to be bipartisan to give companies confidence that the government will remain committed to the project. One encouraging model is the CHIPS Act, which was passed by a bipartisan congressional coalition in 2022 to subsidize semiconductor production. The biggest motivation was the potential that China would invade Taiwan and disrupt global semiconductor markets.

The thorniest part of rare earth production is pollution. Any congressional bill should include money for cleanup as well as for research into cleaner extraction and processing methods and into rare earth alternatives.

Breaking China’s dominance will require creativity and patience. But the goal should be nonnegotiable. The United States and its allies must solve their rare earth problem. The world’s democracies cannot depend on the most powerful authoritarian state — and an increasingly aggressive one — for critical minerals. The potential costs, to prosperity and freedom, are too great.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/opinion/the-us-must-end-chinas-rare-earth-dominance.html

___

Dec. 23

The Wall Street Journal

The U.S. economy has been marked this year by the paradox of a rising stock market but a slowing labor market. Could the explanation be a productivity boom, led in part by artificial intelligence? That seems possible given Wednesday’s report that the economy grew a robust 4.3% in the third quarter.

The report, delayed by the government shutdown, came in well above most forecasts. Consumer confidence is down in surveys, but you wouldn’t know it from the healthy 2.4 percentage-point contribution to third quarter GDP. Healthcare, prescription drugs and international travel were leading contributors, with healthcare accounting for a third of the increase. Is this an Ozempic boom?

Airlines have reported that wealthier customers are traveling abroad more, and a buoyant stock market lifted by AI may make them feel richer. If your stock portfolio is up 20% over the year, why not holiday in Rome?

One concern is that spending is uneven, with many companies reporting a pullback by lower- and middle-income consumers. General Mills said last week that consumers earning less than $100,000 a year are buying more food at price promotions. Chipotle in October reported a slowdown in spending among younger and less affluent customers.

Another concern is inflation. The core personal consumption expenditure price index (less food and energy) rose 2.9% in the third quarter, versus 2.6% in the second. Yet disposable personal income increased only 2.8% and the savings rate fell to 4.2%. People aren’t going to feel better about the economy until their incomes keep up with rising prices.

An increase in net exports supplied 1.6 percentage points to growth. Much of this owes to a decline in imports, following the import boom early in the year as businesses tried to front-run tariffs. A decline in imports isn’t healthy if it means higher prices for consumers or U.S. businesses that become less competitive because they pay more for components. Business investment in equipment continued its healthy growth (AI?), though overall private investment was down owing to declines in residential housing and business structures.

Trumponomics boils down to a bet that the pro-growth impact of deregulation and tax reduction can offset the damage from tariffs, which are tax increases. Imagine how well the economy would be doing without tariffs.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-economy-gdp-consumers-artificial-intelligence-productivity-66cb7afe?mod=editorials_article_pos2

___

Dec. 17

The St, Louis Post-Dispatch on Donald Trump's reaction to the death of Rob Reiner

t’s time to ask the question plainly: Has Donald Trump finally, fully lost it?

The latest indication that Trump is no longer just instinctively belligerent and cruel, but perhaps is experiencing something even more psychologically alarming, came Monday, in the form of (what else?) a social media post.

“Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, commenting on the weekend murders of the prominent Hollywood couple.

Then, off the cliff. Trump’s post claimed, baselessly and ridiculously, that the actor-director’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”

There was some derangement going on here, all right.

Trump continued: “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

Please pause here and read that again, keeping in mind that this person mocking murder victims, conjuring up a self-focused and utterly fantastical motive for their murders and grandly referring to himself in the third person has the power to unilaterally launch a nuclear first-strike at any time, at any target.

In this age of AI, the first instinct of any rational reader would be to wonder if the post was even real. Trump erased any doubt by doubling down on his contempt for the dead in subsequent comments to reporters. Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” said … Trump.

Reiner, 78, and Michele Singer Reiner, 70, were found stabbed to death in their California home Sunday. Their son, Nick Reiner, 32, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

Reiner was famous as Archie Bunker’s “meathead” son-in-law in the landmark 1970s sitcom “All in the Family,” and later as an acclaimed director (“When Harry Met Sally,” “The Princess Bride,” “This is Spinal Tap”). He was an outspoken backer of liberal causes and a Trump critic.

The world by now is used to Trump’s bottomless malice toward anyone who has ever said anything less than laudatory about him. That he’s a clinical narcissist has been virtually beyond debate throughout his decade as a leading political figure. And we all know of his grotesque penchant for mocking the dead or wounded — from John McCain to Paul Pelosi to martyred American soldiers (“ suckers and losers ”).

This one feels a little different, though. Like his other unhinged outbursts lately — admonishing a female reporter with “Quiet, piggy!” for example — it was a shocking display of childishness and classlessness (even for him) with no apparent political upside. In fact, Trump’s Reiner comments were so obscene that even a few Republican members of Congress roused themselves from their sycophantic slumber to chide him for it.

This wasn’t some ingenious four-dimensional-chess move. This was clearly a cognitive break from reality combined with a lack of impulse control.

Again — ponder those nukes.

This page highlighted former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and repeatedly pressed for him to forgo a reelection campaign for well over a year before that disastrous 2024 debate performance forced the issue. That, too, was a dangerous situation, but at least in Biden’s case, it’s clear that others were running the government as he declined.

There’s no indication of such grownups in the room around Trump. If anything, his collection of misfit minions — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the rest — have shown an infinite eagerness to follow him down whatever unconstitutional rabbit hole he’s inclined to go.

What to do with all this?

At a minimum, the nation should resume the debate, started during Trump’s first term, over whether any president should have unilateral authority to launch a nuclear first-strike without input from anyone else, as is currently the case. We should also be talking about whether an upper age limit and/or cognitive function exams should be added to the constitutional requirements for being president.

Meanwhile, Americans should resist the familiar urge toward numbness at Trump’s constant barrage of out-there rhetoric. Driven by cognitive decline or not, his continuing assaults on civilizational norms must never become normal.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_2bc0cbf0-2698-4a71-a2e4-dec4b5d17490.html

___

Dec. 23

The Boston Globe on the re-classification of marijuana

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order directing his attorney general to complete the process of reclassifying marijuana as a less harmful drug, finishing a process that began under the Biden administration.

Trump intends to move marijuana from a Schedule I drug, a category that includes dangerous drugs that have no accepted medical use, to Schedule III, putting it in a category of drugs like ketamine or testosterone, which have “ moderate to low ” potential for dependence and have an accepted medical use.

Trump, announcing the order, focused on the potential benefits of medical marijuana, while decrying its use recreationally. There are more procedural steps before rescheduling can occur, and the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana is expected to sue.

But if the order goes through, rescheduling marijuana would be a step forward, ending the irrational federal policy that has lumped cannabis together with hard drugs like heroin. It could throw a lifeline to Massachusetts’s struggling marijuana industry by eliminating an inequity in the federal tax code that forbids state-licensed marijuana companies like growers and dispensaries from writing off business expenses.

The decision could also provide a shot in the arm to much-needed marijuana research by eliminating regulatory barriers. And it could provide easier access to some cannabis products to seniors through Medicare, which current does not cover any cannabis products.

These are all positive steps — although rescheduling will not fully move marijuana out of a regulatory gray area because it will remain federally illegal.

Congress should take the next step by opening the industry to banking services, including business loans and even checking accounts. (Today, many federally chartered banks will not accept business from a marijuana company.) Meanwhile, state regulators should ensure Massachusetts is poised to take advantage of research opportunities.

The biggest immediate impact of Trump’s announcement would be lowering the federal taxes paid by marijuana businesses. Currently, state-licensed shops fall under a tax law called 280E, which prohibits businesses from taking deductions and credits for trafficking in a Schedule I or II controlled substance.

Frank Segall, a Boston-based cannabis attorney for Blank Rome, said the effective tax rate for cannabis businesses can be more than 70 percent. If marijuana is rescheduled, business owners could deduct costs like payroll or advertising, like any other business.

Kristin Rogers, CEO of LEVIA, a Georgetown-based cannabis beverage manufacturing company, told the editorial board she would see a 20 to 30 percent federal tax cut without 280E. “This is huge, actually getting to function like any other industry,” Rogers said.

While rescheduling won’t immediately impact other financial services, Segall said it could be a step toward changes like letting cannabis businesses be publicly traded on US stock exchanges and giving businesses access to bankruptcy court.

The Cannabis Regulators Association said the Department of Treasury could potentially issue guidance to let more banks provide services to cannabis companies. Those changes would require additional steps by Congress or the administration.

The other major change from this order will be making it easier for marijuana researchers to receive a license from the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Rescheduling would eliminate storage and security requirements related to experimenting with Schedule I drugs, although it would not necessarily change rules related to where marijuana can be grown or the approvals needed for clinical trials.

Rescheduling could make universities less fearful about losing federal funding if they conduct marijuana research, and could make younger scientists more inclined to enter the field if regulatory barriers are lower.

Cannabis Control Commission research director Julie Johnson said in a statement to the editorial board that the commission is developing a Center for Cannabis Research and Policy to bring researchers across the United States together to conduct collaborative research, especially around medical uses and benefits of marijuana. Massachusetts regulators should also ensure the state is positioned to let our universities, industry, and hospitals become research hubs.

“Massachusetts should be leading the pack in terms of cannabis and cannabinoid-based research,” said Staci Gruber, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery program at McLean Hospital. “We have all the requisite tools, institutions, and individuals who are well-ensconced in this arena.”

Today, Massachusetts offers a state license for cannabis research facilities, but a license has only been issued to one company. Foley Hoag attorney Kevin Conroy said the license is ill-suited to the industry. It requires a lab to sign a host community agreement with a municipality and requires researchers to disclose specifics of their research. A federal shift may make it possible to reform, or even eliminate, the state license.

The executive order instructs administration officials to work with Congress to develop a regulatory scheme for hemp-derived CBD, which has been a legal gray area. Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz said at the signing ceremony that Medicare could begin a pilot program by April providing insurance coverage for CBD-infused products for some seniors, initially focused on cancer care and palliative care, with a physician’s recommendation. (CBD is a compound derived from the cannabis plant that doesn’t cause a high.)

This pilot program has long been a pet project of Howard Kessler, a businessman and philanthropist who lives part-time in Massachusetts and who attended Trump’s signing ceremony. Kessler told the editorial board in 2023 that seniors have unique health care needs and could benefit from cannabis therapies, but they often don’t want to visit dispensaries, register as a medical patient, leave the traditional medical system, or pay out of pocket.

With 40 states and Washington, D.C. allowing medical marijuana, continuing to classify the drug as having no medical use is nonsensical. Rescheduling it is the right move.

ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/23/opinion/marijuana-rescheduling-cannabis-trump/