This guest post is by Curtis Valentine, a Term Member with the Council on Foreign Relations and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (South Africa 2001-2003)

The continuous debates over domestic issues like immigration, education, the economy, and healthcare reveal what most of us already know: America is divided politically and economically. The results of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections suggest that most of us live amongst like-minded individuals. The disparity in income in America is among the highest of any developed country. A program of mandatory national service could help to bridge those divides, build greater unity, while putting millions of young people to work on the growing number of domestic challenges that compromise our economic and military competitiveness around the world. Read more »

The following is a guest post by two of the leading experts on Chinese foreign direct investment in the United States, and on the U.S. government’s investment review process. Thilo Hanemann is Research Director at the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm based in New York, and Daniel Rosen is China Practice Leader at Rhodium and a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Read more »

The following is a guest post by Scott Thomasson, the president of NewBuild Strategies LLC, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm in Washington, DC.

When voters in Atlanta went to the polls at the end of July for a major transportation funding referendum, transportation watchers turned their eyes to Georgia with hopes of a positive story of local leadership after a long, frustrating year for federal transportation funding. Read more »

The following is a guest post written by Curtis Valentine, a CFR term member and education reform advocate in Maryland. Follow him on Twitter at @curtiseveryday.

In a recent meeting of the National Governors Association, Education Secretary Arne Duncan proclaimed that “with over 2 million high skilled jobs currently unfilled [America] doesn’t have a job crisis, we have a skills crisis.” Duncan’s remarks are important in view of a recent Education Department report that only 39.3 percent of adults ages twenty-five to thirty-four held an associate, bachelors, or graduate degree in 2010. At this pace, America will never meet the goal set by President Obama for the United States to have the highest college attainment rate in the world by 2020. Read more »