Posted Monday, November 23,  12:40 AM CST,  1:40 AM EST, 0640 GMT.

Top editorial and op-ed commentaries in the Monday editions of the leading U. S. newspapers:

1) In the New York Times, Paul Krugman urges President Obama not to be timid with regard to further stimulus for the American economy. He cites a December 2008 statement by economic adviser Lawrence Summers: ““Many experts … believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year…. doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.” Krugman: “Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.” Will deficit spending for the sake of stimulus bring about inflation and soaring interest rates? “As far as I can tell, the analysts now warning about soaring interest rates tend to be the same people who insisted, months after the Great Recession began, that the biggest threat facing the economy was inflation.”

2) In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson warns that the health-care reform bill emerging from Congress may shift costs disproportionately from the old to the young. “On health insurance, we may choose to override some risk adjustments (say, for preexisting medical conditions) for public policy reasons. But the case for making age one of these exceptions is weak. Working Americans — the young and middle-aged — already pay a huge part of the health costs of the elderly through Medicare and Medicaid. These will grow with an aging population and surging health spending. Either taxes will rise or other public services will fall.” If premiums for older people are higher, “this might have a silver lining: Facing their true health costs, older Americans might become more eager to control spending.”

3) In the WP, E. J. Dionne suggests that, while President Obama will not withdraw from Afghanistan, he is wary of an open-ended commitment. Dionne cites Andrew Bacevich’s remark: “… permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States.” Dionne: “Americans have always been willing to battle terrorists. What they did not count on — and were not led to expect when the Bush administration committed troops to Afghanistan and then to Iraq — were two long, violent, indefinite occupations costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars…. Typically, those most angered by talk of the immense expense of these wars are the very conservatives who bemoan America’s fiscal condition and the dangers of long-term deficits — yet had no qualms over starting two wars and cutting taxes at the same time.”

4) In the Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of Foundation for Defense of Democracies calls on President Obama to be more blunt when he addresses the Muslim world. “Thoughtful men should certainly not want to see a U.S. president propel a ‘clash of civilizations’ with devout Muslims. However, clash-avoidance shouldn’t lead us into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The stakes are so enormous—jihadists would if they could let loose a weapon of mass destruction in a Western city—that we should not prevaricate out of politeness, or deceive ourselves into believing that a debate between Muslims and non-Muslims can only be counterproductive.”