Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.Conservative Republicans say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.In fact, our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and the increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go

The minimum wage has put a floor under workers’ wages since taking effect 75 years ago on Oct. 24, 1938. But at $7.25 an hour, today’s federal minimum wage is the same as it was in 1950, after adjusting for inflation.Too little, too late minimum wage raises are the next best things to eliminating it for minimum wage opponents.“If we would have had our druthers,” said Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, “We would have eliminated it.” But, as the

WASHINGTON ― James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is not your sleek, button-down spy chief. The 72-year-old retired Air Force general has a beatnik goatee, a tendency to speak in malapropisms and a cranky attitude that he sometimes sums up with the phrase “I’m too old for this [expletive]!” The structure of Clapper’s position overseeing the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies has itself been a kind of bureaucratic nightmare. The post was created in 2004 to reduce the turf wars wit

You might think the International Committee of the Red Cross would have plenty to do just providing humanitarian aid to people in war zones. And so it does. So why is the organization poking its nose into the debate over violent video games?As it turns out, that’s also a pretty good use of its time.Among the millions of young people who play such games today ― virtually capturing, torturing and killing enemy combatants ― are some of the soldiers, military officers, government leaders and opinion

The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office has launched an inquiry into the unseemly clash between high-ranking prosecutors involved in the probe into the National Intelligence Service’s alleged meddling in the December presidential election. The inspection should be carried out swiftly to help prosecutors get their act together. Inspectors should first determine whether Cho Young-kon, head of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, stonewalled the probe into the spy agency. The allegation against

A clash is looming between the government and physicians over the introduction of telemedicine, the delivery of medical care using telecommunications technologies. Telemedicine enables patients in remote regions to receive care from doctors without having to travel to visit them. Yet it is banned in Korea, a country known for its advanced ICT infrastructure. Economic ministries have long sought to lift the ban to increase medical welfare for people and curb medical costs. They also believe telem

When President Obama decided last month to attack the chemical weapons facilities in Syria to save the lives of innocent citizens, President Vladimir Putin vehemently criticized Obama’s rationale for the attack and presented a compromise solution: dismantlement of all the chemical weapons systems by an international body. Obama accepted the proposal and postponed his attack plan. The world felt that Russia defeated the U.S. in a global leadership contest without fighting, damaged American global

President Obama and the Democrats won; Republicans and the “tea party” lost. And both sides are gearing up for next time.Now that our recent brush with financial crisis is behind us, it’s time to start planning for the next one.That’s the problem Congress set up in the stopgap deal that ended the 16-day government shutdown and averted a collision with the debt ceiling. After all the sound and fury, the two parties agreed only on continuing federal spending at its current level until Jan. 15 and

PARIS ― JPMorgan Chase has had a bad year. Not only has the bank just reported its first quarterly loss in more than a decade; it has also agreed to a tentative deal to pay a fine of $13 billion to the U.S. government as punishment for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities. Other big legal and regulatory costs loom. JPMorgan will bounce back, of course, but its travails have reopened the debate about what to do with banks that are “too big to fail.”In the United States, policymakers chose to in

The Food and Drug Administration has outlawed the only over-the-counter asthma medicine in the U.S. It has also banned a number of other asthma medicines that patients like and that doctors have prescribed for them.In imposing these prohibitions, the FDA hasn’t denied that the banned asthma medicines are safe and effective for their intended use. (Disclosure: While serving as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during President Barack Obama’s first term,

After two years working at a St. Louis Wendy’s, Alisha Snider still cannot afford basics like rent, food, clothes and daycare for her three daughters. The 26-year-old earns only $7.50 an hour and works just 20 hours a week. So how does Alisha make ends meet? She puts her kids in a taxpayer-funded daycare program and uses $398 a month in food stamps to feed them.New research we published Tuesday shows Alisha is far from alone. It might come as a surprise that most Americans on public assistance p

Should America still be trying to promote democracy abroad ― especially when its own is so dysfunctional?This question has been nagging at me since the Obama administration announced a partial freeze on military aid to Egypt this month. The aim: to (belatedly) display U.S. displeasure over the Egyptian military’s bloody ouster of an elected president in July. (The aid will be restored if Egypt makes progress toward an “inclusive” elected government.)The cutoff was avidly pushed by both Republica

Anybody who has ever encountered the college admissions process knows that there’s no such thing as an even playing field. Most schools will admit that upfront. “Like all colleges,” Harvard College notes on its own admissions website, “we seek to admit the most interesting, able, and diverse class possible.”In other words, schools often try to balance out an incoming class with students who not only have good grades or high test scores but have had unusual life experiences as well as those they

Korea used to be called “a country of courteous people in the East.” According to the epithet, the Korean people valued politesse, courtesy and propriety in the past. Korea was also known as the “Hermit Kingdom” and “the Land of the Morning Calm.” Such descriptions indicate that the Korean people were traditionally a peaceful, reclusive people living in a serene country unknown to the rest of the world. Modern Koreans, however, seem to be neither particularly courteous, nor reclusive. Indeed, fe

As with so many other industries ― medical tourism, electric cars, phablets ― Asia is widely considered to be the future of the Internet. There is, however, one very big “if”: If only the continent’s governments can get over their tendencies toward overregulation and censorship.Almost half the world’s Web users live in the region. Asia boasts some of the world’s fastest broadband speeds, as well as the fastest rate of growth in mobile broadband. Its share of the global e-commerce market stands a

Oct. 24 is Food Day, a time to reflect on the foods we ― and our kids ― eat.There are 17.9 million food insecure households, 3.9 million of whom have children. Yet, more than one-third of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight or obese. Ironically, food insecurity often contributes to obesity.So does lack of proper education about food and nutrition. On average, U.S. students get less than four hours of food education per year. Millions of kids aren’t learning about the importance of fresh

NEW DELHI ― Recent incidents on the Line of Control ― the frontier between India and Pakistan in the state of Jammu and Kashmir ― have again raised fundamental questions about the nuclear-armed neighbors’ fraught relationship. Early this month, India’s army foiled an attempted incursion by a group of 30 to 40 militants from Pakistani territory, leading Indian critics to decry official peace overtures. Indeed, barely two weeks before the latest incident, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met w

The Korean tourism industry is beginning to feel the impact of China’s new tourism law that went into effect Oct. 1. The law is designed to protect outbound Chinese tourists from unscrupulous tour operators. Specifically, it bans travel agencies from selling tour products that look like a bargain as prices are unreasonably low, but are actually a rip-off as they force tourists to go shopping for long hours simply to help local tour operators get kickbacks from shops. The law had an immediate imp

The Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union faces delegalization as its members have voted against the government’s order to amend its constitution that allows dismissed teachers to be members. About 60,000 of its 75,000 members participated in the vote held for three days last week, with some 70 percent choosing to defy the government, even if it would mean their union being deprived of its hard-won legal status. A month ago, the Ministry of Employment and Labor issued an ultimatum demandi

WASHINGTON ― Many Republicans have been muttering over the last few weeks of political craziness that the tea party’s hold on the GOP must be broken to protect their party’s future health ― not to mention, the country’s. So I’ve been asking Republicans what a movement to break the extremists’ power would actually look like. I put the question to a half-dozen prominent Republican strategists and analysts, and to one particularly influential Democrat, David Plouffe. The answers convince me that a