Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
May 28
The Washington Post on the debt limit
Finally, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have reached a deal to avert an embarrassing - and potentially disastrous - U.S.
default. It´s hard to view this as a celebratory moment given how close the nation came to being unable to pay its obligations to investors, the military, hospitals and more. But there´s relief that the worst-case scenario has been avoided and that there is still some possibility for bipartisanship in U.S.
politics. That is a low bar, but Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy cleared it.
The agreement "in principle" still has to pass Congress, which is not a given, especially in the House, where far-right members are already bashing it.
The June 5 deadline for default leaves little room for antics.
If this passes, the nation won´t face another debt limit crisis until 2025. The basics of the deal appear sensible, and most Americans will probably approve of them.
It imposes spending caps, but they are not onerous, as the cuts in the initial House Republican bill were.
After several years of discretionary budget increases, this will force what is essentially a two-year pause at most federal agencies. Unspent coronavirus funds will also be clawed back - a reasonable compromise that this Editorial Board had advocated in recent weeks. The deal avoids the mistake the Obama-Biden White House made in 2011 when it agreed to caps for a decade that slowed the recovery and hampered its ability to do much in its second term.
If any sort of political center still exists in Washington, the tentative deal is about as close as it comes to finding it.
Both sides got some of what they wanted: Republicans achieved some cuts, including to Internal Revenue Service funding, and Democrats preserved spending on important domestic programs, from the environment to education, at about current levels. Even on contentious issues such as tying work requirements to government assistance, Mr.
Biden and Mr. McCarthy appear to have taken the least controversial route, which is increasing them for older food stamp recipients with no children.
What should not happen now is for Americans to breathe a sigh of relief and move on. Yes, a last-minute compromise occurred, but a dangerous precedent has been set.
House Republicans have now used the debt limit twice to create a hostage-like situation that brings the nation close to an unthinkable default. Expect that a future Republican Congress would be willing to go over the cliff to extract more.
The debt limit itself needs to be scrapped.
Enacted in World War I, it was created so Congress would not have to keep approving debt issuances. A century ago, the limit was set high to avoid hitting it. Over time, the debt ceiling took on a different role as a useful check on bipartisan spending largesse.
It played a role in the 1990s in pushing lawmakers to reduce the national deficit and enact a balanced budget at the turn of the century. In recent years, as the normal budget process in Congress has broken down, the debt ceiling has functioned as one of the few moments of reckoning on the increasingly alarming fiscal outlook.
But this latest deal has shown that this isn´t a substitute for coming up with an actual, forward-looking fiscal strategy.
Republicans employ the debt limit to force cuts to nondefense discretionary spending, which is only about 16% of total government expenditures. But this slice is not a key driver of the nation´s debt problems. The refusal of either party to tackle rapidly rising Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs - along with Republicans´ opposition to any tax increases - means the debt limit isn´t forcing the tough choices that are needed.
Almost no other nation has anything like a debt ceiling because it no longer makes any sense.
Congress has already approved the spending that forced the debt to rise; there should be no question, much less the possibility of an economic cataclysm, when the bills come due. Members of both parties have called for an end to the debt limit because it risks too much for the United States - and the entire global financial system, as well as the livelihoods of federal workers, خرید هاست و دامنه veterans and businesses who need to be paid.
This crisis may pass, but 2025 is coming soon.
ONLINE: ___
May 28
The Los Angeles Times on an oil executive hosting the U.N. climate summit
This year´s United Nations climate summit in Dubai marks another opportunity for world leaders to do more to slow global warming, replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and be held accountable for their emissions-cutting pledges.
But how effective can we expect these negotiations to be when they´re presided over by an oil executive?
The president of this fall´s COP 28 summit, being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, will be Sultan Al Jaber, who runs the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.
The naming of Al Jaber to this position is so obvious a contradiction that climate activists and politicians have likened it to letting arms dealers lead peace talks or putting a tobacco CEO in charge of health policy. Public pressure for his ouster increased last week when more than 130 U.S. and European lawmakers called for Al Jaber to be removed, writing in a joint letter of their "profound concern" that the U.N. is permitting "private sector polluters to exert undue influence."
Putting an oil executive in charge is not only a bad look, it stands to undermine important and urgent negotiations and further erode public confidence in summits that have been criticized as little more than high-level venues for greenwashing. And it increases the likelihood that we´ll see another year of frustratingly little progress, where world leaders make only incremental changes while the climate crisis barrels ahead. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a report two months ago that the planet is on track to blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming within a decade unless we immediately switch to renewable energy and slash greenhouse gas pollution in half by 2030.
But at the same time, the decision to pick Al Jaber to lead the summit only clarifies for the public how much power oil and gas interests already wield in this process. The fossil fuel industry is one of the largest delegations at the summits, sending more than 600 of its lobbyists to last year´s COP 27 summit in Egypt, up from about 500 the year before in Scotland.
COP 28 organizers pointed to Al Jaber´s experience as an engineer, a global energy industry leader and his other position as chair of Masdar, another state-owned company that develops solar and wind farms and other renewable energy projects. U.S.