Christian Science Monitor

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the nonpartisan watchdog group that prepared the analysis, found that under some plans, the national debt would shoot up even higher than it would under status quo policies.

"The impact on the budget would likely be major," said Alice Rivlin, a former Fed official who spoke at a Thursday panel discussion at the New America Foundation in Washington, at which the CRFB report was presented. She didn't elaborate on the ...

As guest blogger Anya Landau French wrote in The Havana Note last week, after debates in Tampa, the candidates were “all singing the same broken record,” many taking a hard-line approach to appeal to exiles in Florida. Newt Gingrich said he would try ...

When Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work on microfinance with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, he would have been mortified to know that a version of his model would one day force his country’s poor into the organ trade. At the time, microfinance (particularly the practice of giving small loans to the unsalaried poor with low to no collateral) was revered for its ability to “do good while doing well.” In other words, it enabled people to escape poverty while turning a profit.

Whenever someone asked me why we have the same anachronistic policy toward an island nation 90 ninety from our shores that we have had for half a century, I generally tell them that Cuba simply "doesn't matter." In a big-picture sense, our policy hasn't changed (or has only gotten hotter) since the Cold War ended and left two combatants behind on the field.

A report released by the New America Foundation in October found that while locals in Helmand say the Taliban are weaker now compared with 12 months ago, 49 percent of the population say they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. ...

I've just finished reading a new report by Professor Richard Feinberg, a former Clinton administration official and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.  "Reaching Out: Cuba's New Economy and the International Response," clocked in at a daunting 101 pages but should nonetheless be required reading for anyone following the island nation's long-awaited economic restructuring.

Still, that goal should have been attainable, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington. “It will not reflect well on the people who used this opportunity to move toward compromise to, instead, ...

“The whole push to go big has been surprisingly contagious,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Members have pushed themselves out of their comfort zones, and I feel like a deal is completely within ...

“He can step down confident he's not going to miss any action,” says Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation in Washington. “And confident as well that he's left behind a situation that is not going to ...