When faced with a crisis, the ancient Romans sometimes turned to plagiarism. Take, for instance, the Second Punic War: Hannibal had managed to cross the Alps with his famous elephants and had promptly descended into the neighborhood of Cannae, where he slaughtered some tens of thousands of Roman men in one of the most brilliantly orchestrated battles in history. There was, practically speaking, nothing much stopping him from approaching Rome. Since offering sacrifices to their own pantheon wasn’t quite doing the trick, the Romans (per Livy) turned to a little known goddess from somewhere else named Cybele. As one might imagine, her specialty was war. From a Roman perspective, the tactic worked: In 202, Scipio managed to decisively defeat Hannibal, and a little more than 50 years later, the Romans salted the Carthaginian earth. Cybele might have disappeared quietly, known only by Livy’s reference to her. But she didn’t. (READ MORE: Catholics Blast Notre Dame’s Promotion of Abortion Activist) Cybele, you see, was good at something else the Romans were struggling with at the time: fertility. At the time the Blessed Virgin was raising the Christ Child, Caesar Augustus was using the law to try and persuade Roman women to have more than three children — given that skeletons of elite women in Herculaneum suggest they were having less than two children on average, those measures were easily justified. On the religious and propagandistic front, Cybele remained prominent. That seems ironic for an empire whose doctors happily employed more than two hundred abortifacients to rid Romans of their unwanted children. While Romans apparently recognized that children are a critical component of preserving a civilization, individuals weren’t all that interested in having children themselves. Unsurprisingly, their city and their empire eventually collapsed. I’m not the first person to tell this story — plenty of writers and pro-life thinkers have noted that ancient Rome’s population problem is very similar to our own. But despite knowing how that story ended, our birth rate remains a problem we haven’t solved. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office adjusted the population prediction it had made just last year. Taking into account lower immigration levels (until 2029) and the way birth rates have continued to plummet, it estimated that its original prediction for peak population was too high by eight million people. At this point, it looks like the death rate in the U.S. will overtake its birth rate in 2030 and that we’ll start seeing population decline sometime in the mid-2050s. The new predictions are, as Daniel Di Martino from the Manhattan Institute said, both the most “pessimistic and realistic of any government agency.” They may still be too high. They assume that our country’s plummeting fertility rates will stabilize at 1.5 births per woman sometime around 2036, and stay constant ever after. It would be inaccurate to suggest that we’re walking into this crisis unknowingly and without trying to avert it. Public figures like Elon Musk have frequently commented on it. Many on the Right (like Charlie Kirk) have attempted to inspire people to live the kinds of lives that would avert it. Inspiration is great, but ultimately, reversing population decline is going to require more than just inspiration. We can debate cultural and economic factors endlessly, but the fact is our government’s public policy directly ends hundreds of thousands of lives every year, and that’s going to require some legal changes — changes the Trump administration seems loath to make. (READ MORE: New York State Serves Up Insanity on Egg Freezing) Earlier this month, some Senate members attended a closed-door briefing with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. One of the topics of conversation? The abortion pill, mifepristone. Apparently, the briefing didn’t go super well. The FDA is in the process of doing a safety review of mifepristone, but according to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Makary couldn’t give a timeline on that review. He didn’t explain what it would involve. He didn’t even say whether it was underway. When Politico reached out to the FDA for comment, they were referred to a previous statement. It should be noted that the safety review is rather important. Last year, the Ethics and Public Policy Center used insurance claims to determine that “the rate of life-threatening complications due to mifepristone is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA … suggest[s].” The analysis found that more than one in 10 women who received chemical abortions experienced potentially life-threatening events, including “emergency room visits, hemorrhage, sepsis, infection, and/or follow-up surgeries” within 45 days of taking the pill. Despite the danger, mifepristone is responsible for well over half the abortions taking place in the United States. There are, from a moral perspective, two paramount issues with the abortion pill. The most important is that it is designed to take the life of an unborn child; the second is that it frequently inflicts harm on that child’s mother. Tragically, neither of those moral issues has been sufficient to galvanize the government into action. Perhaps this lesser issue will. Mifepristone is partly responsible for the coming population crisis — both because the drug actually kills babies and because its ease of access perpetuates a culture of death. If we want to avert it and preserve our civilization (something Secretary of State Marco Rubio admirably defended in Munich this past weekend), we’re going to need to ban the pill. READ MORE from Aubrey Harris: Olympic Athletes Fail at Their One Job

Despite what progressives have been arguing lately, the United States does not have a tax problem. Federal revenues, even after last year’s extension of the Trump tax cuts, are running above their historical average as a share of GDP. What America has is a spending problem so large that the Congressional Budget Office’s latest 10-year outlook reads less like a fiscal forecast than a warning label. Between now and 2036, the CBO projects $94.6 trillion in federal spending against $70.2 trillion in revenue, a decadelong deficit of $24.4 trillion. Outlays reached 23.1 percent of GDP in 2025, nearly two full percentage points above the 50-year average, meaning annual spending growth is outpacing the economy itself. Debt held by the public is projected to hit 101 percent of GDP this year, which will surpass the post-WWII record of 106 percent by 2030, and climb to 120 percent by 2036. The Trump administration says it wants to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by the end of this presidential term, roughly half the current trajectory. The CBO’s numbers show how far that ambition is from reality. The cost of paying the interest is now the central story, and it’s a grim one. Net interest outlays will rise from about $1 trillion this year to more than $2.1 trillion by 2036, when interest payments alone are projected to consume more than a quarter of total tax revenues. The federal government will spend more on the costs of past borrowing than it spends on many of the programs the borrowing was supposed to fund. The interest problem reflects both rising debt and the compounding effect of all that borrowing. As deficits raise indebtedness, interest payments increase, financed by additional borrowing. If interest rates rise more than projected, the dynamic accelerates. These fiscal troubles are further intensified by spending on autopilot. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and net interest are projected to represent roughly 73 percent of total outlays by 2036 and absorb nearly all federal revenues. Think about that: Virtually every dollar the government collects in taxes will pay for entitlements and interest before Congress appropriates even a single cent for defense, infrastructure, research, or anything else. Congress’s room to maneuver shrinks each year, not because of the choices it’s making so much as the choices it’s not willing to make. Nonetheless, politicians have been busy making things worse by further increasing the number of tax carveouts, which are better understood as spending through the tax code. The CBO notes that these tax expenditures, including no tax on tips and a new tax credit for seniors, equal 8 percent of GDP. In the coming decade, that cumulative revenue loss will amount to more than $34 trillion. As always, the CBO’s report relies on various optimistic assumptions: that temporary tax provisions are allowed to expire on schedule; that planned spending reductions actually occur; that controversial tariffs remain in place; that interest rates remain where they are now. It also assumes that in 2032, when the Social Security Trust fund dries up, Congress will borrow enough to maintain all benefits at their current level without creating more inflation. Not all these things will happen. On the other hand, the report does embed several assumptions that might be tilting the outlook in a more pessimistic direction. The CBO assumes less economic growth than some private-sector forecasts, which could suppress projected revenues and elevate projected debt ratios. Stronger productivity or labor-force growth would materially improve the fiscal picture. And, of course, if Congress decides against all expectations to reform Social Security (rather than slap on an expensive bandage), once the trust fund is exhausted the long-term outlook would stabilize. This is a two-party failure. Entitlement growth reflects demographic realities and longstanding, fixable design flaws. Recent tax legislation reduced revenue despite some welcomed spending offsets. The honest accounting is that both parties have contributed to this problem and neither has offered a plan equal to its scale. It’s why both sides should care. It’s simply not possible to treat persistent, trillion-dollar budget deficits as an abstraction much longer. They divert capital away from productive private investment, raise real interest rates, and slow growth. They also hollow politicians’ own fiscal capacity. When the next emergency hits, the government will start from a position of weakness. And in a stressed environment, every additional dollar of emergency borrowing comes at a higher cost than it should. If policymakers refuse to align spending with revenues so as to reassure investors that America will pay its debt, the market’s adjustment will be painful. It will unleash higher inflation. President Donald Trump must make good on his deficit-reduction promise. Democrats must sign on. Reform is a choice. Disorder is what happens when that choice is deferred. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

Western Civilization Will Disintegrate Without Truth

Stephen Colbert Hates Black Women and Other Universal Truths

NBC Poll Finds Declining Support For Trump's Immigration Agenda — Blame NBC

Why is the Federal Government Fundraising for Political Orgs – And Mostly Benefiting One Political Party?

Why Repealing the Endangerment Finding Is a Triumph for Science, Jobs, and American Families

Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Care

What Should President Trump Say at his State of the Union on Tuesday?

What Do the Dems Do After They’ve Done Their Worst and It Flops?