The Economist ominously reports: The struggle to digest the swollen generation of ageing baby-boomers threatens to strangle economic growth. As the nature and scale of the problem become clear, a showdown between the generations may be inevitable.The statistics are frightening: The average federal tax rate for a median American household, including income and payroll taxes, […]

On a day that America’s focus was fixed on the presidential combatants at the University of Denver, a leadership struggle of another kind was taking place in Central Asia. AP: Protesters clashed with police and tried to break into a building housing the parliament and government offices in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Wednesday during a rally to demand […]

Anyone wondering what WRM would look like on a presidential advisory team need only look at Lee Smith’s recent piece for Tablet. Also featured in the piece (and photo—undoctored, of course) are Elliot Abrams, Tom Friedman, and Aaron David Miller. Lee asked each to offer advice to the next President of the United States on […]

Contrary to exclamations from the Obama administration and the mainstream press, Al-Qaeda is not dead, not gone, and not “on its last legs.” In fact, the regional groups that together make up “Al-Qaeda” have had different fortunes in recent months, as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reports for Foreign Policy, but its fighters are still out there: This isn’t […]

Turkey’s military bombed Syria again today, killing “several Syrian soldiers,” according to reports. The strikes were retaliation for a Syrian shell that killed a civilian family yesterday—the “the last straw,” said Turkish officials. Today the Turks are considering further action, reports Reuters: Turkey’s government said “aggressive action” against its territory by Syria’s military had become […]

If you were a political junkie who missed last night’s presidential debate, you could have quickly found out what happened by flipping between Fox and MSNBC. On Fox it was all high-fiving and smiles; MSNBC was all dour and ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda.’ After listening to the President’s closing statement, a distraught Andrew Sullivan asked “How […]

The mullahs of Iran have some unpleasant news to digest; police and rioters were fighting today in the streets of Tehran as unhappiness over the country’s collapsing currency and decrepit economy boiled over into violence. As the New York Times reports, protesters linked the regime’s unpopular foreign policy with their domestic woes. The Times story […]

The Syrian civil war took a definitive turn towards becoming a proper international crisis. Earlier today, Syrian shells fell on a Turkish border town killing five civilians. Turkey responded soon after by shelling targets within Syria. Turkey is, of course, a member of NATO: NATO said it would convene an urgent meeting on the issue […]

Drug policy is one of those areas Americans—left, right, and center—almost all agree about, in at least one respect: Our nation’s drug policies are often ineffectual at best and, at worst, self-defeating. The Drug War is obscenely expensive; it swells the ranks of a criminal class, ruining lives, destroying families, and filling our prisons to […]

Is Latin America in for a rough ride, or is it just Brazil and Argentina that are making the region’s economic prospects look bad?The 2012 Economic Survey (via BBC News), which is put out by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), predicts that the region’s growth as a whole will be mediocre for […]