The United States is sitting on a vast, untapped economic development tool that has received too little notice: our children.Investing in children before they enter school pays dividends, and yet child care subsidies are at risk as Congress mulls questions about how to reduce the federal deficit. Before you tune this out as the same old “it’s for the kids” chorus, consider:― Children in high-quali

No matter how well we foresee and plan, some aspects of both man-made and natural risks will remain random and unpredictable. This uncertainty is inherent in the very nature of risk, and its chaotic and fickle nature has been reaffirmed by the recent tragedies in Japan. As the Japanese people and their government gradually shift from responding to the immediate safety and humanitarian aftermath of

President Obama spoke last week about the economic reasons for providing a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s undocumented. This is clearly a polarizing issue, and there is much room for honest disagreement. But there’s one fact we can’t ignore: Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. include the parents of 4.5 million children who are legal citizens. What that means is that, on average, one or t

The day after House Speaker John Boehner demanded trillions in budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, Senate Democrats offered him a small down payment Tuesday: a plan to cut $21 billion in unneeded federal subsidies to the extraordinarily profitable oil industry.Not surprisingly, Republicans quickly labeled the proposal a tax increase and declined to provide any support, probably d

During the Golden Week holidays from April 28 to May 8, a total of some 78,000 volunteers worked in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, which were devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, according to “disaster volunteer centers” set up by local governments in the prefectures.On and after May 9, however, that number dropped sharply. On a peak day, there were some 11,000 volunteers,

The world shared the American people’s gratitude for the special forces who rid us of Osama bin Laden, but there was one flagrant exception.“We condemn the assassination of an Arab holy warrior,” declared Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, who also deplored “the continuing American policy ... of shedding Muslim blood.”This is the same Hamas that has launched hundreds o

The symptoms of sub-par English education are often discussed in the pages of this paper, but I’ve yet to read an accurate description of the cause. The cause of the lack of quality teachers is simply government interference in the marketplace, and specifically the preposterous restrictions, and poisonous regulations discouraging native English speakers from coming to Korea to teach, produce, and

When I first heard that Newt Gingrich was mapping a Republican presidential bid ― he formally announced Wednesday ― I recalled what conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said recently about the guy. It sure wasn’t pretty.Coburn was a Newt soldier back in the 1990s, when Newt was riding high as House speaker and conservative Pied Piper. Nevertheless, Coburn told C-SPAN in March that “having served

Let’s call it Boehner’s Law: When you issue an ultimatum, make sure that whatever you’re threatening really is ... the ultimate. In that spirit, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says Republicans need to see trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for letting the Obama administration raise the nation’s debt limit.Hair-on-fire Democrats react that it’s perilous to delay upping the debt

If congressional negotiators fail to resolve their impasse over the federal debt ceiling, we may recall this moment in history as one of the nation’s worst since the morning Custer awoke thinking it might be amusing to go and annoy Sitting Bull.Ensuring the U.S. government’s full faith and credit is a matter of such consequence to the global financial system that everything else concerning the bud