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 »

Midnight. A fishing trawler lurches violently in a squall off the coast of Marseille. A seemingly lifeless body is spotted adrift off the bow, and fished out of the roiling sea. No identification. No memory. Only three enigmatic clues bizarrely implanted in the man’s hip: 000-7-17-12-0-14-26. Gemeinschaft Bank. Zurich. Read more »

On many sunny weekends, I go walking with my wife and kids along the Billy Goat Trail in Maryland, using the access at Carderock Recreation area in the C&O Canal National Historic Park. There is a public restroom operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Interior Department, at the parking lot where the trail begins. It is normally open throughout the year. But when I went there last weekend, I noticed that the facility was closed, with a padlock on the door. Read more »

If there was any question about whether Secretary of State John Kerry would continue Hillary Clinton’s signature “economic statecraft” initiative, it was put to rest in his very first speech. Speaking to students and faculty at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, Kerry spent the bulk of the speech talking about U.S. economic opportunities in the world, and surprisingly little about the traditional foreign policy challenges. Read more »

President Obama’s call in last week’s State of the Union address for high-quality pre-kindergarten education for all American children is long overdue.

The rest of the developed world is well ahead of the United States when it comes to universal pre-K. Just 69 percent of American four-year-olds are in any kind of program, compared to nearly all four-year-olds in most of Western Europe, Japan, and Taiwan, where pre-K is usually part of the public school systems. In other words, for some of the United States’ chief economic competitors, school starts a full year earlier. Read more »

Until recently, relatively little attention was paid to states’ balance sheets. Measurement and reporting were neglected. Even today, states’ liabilities receive considerable attention, while their asset sides receive significantly less.

In an earlier era, states owned substantial industrial assets. This “commanding heights of the economy” model was rejected largely because it seriously under-performed, especially when state-owned sectors were protected from competition (as was the norm). Efficiency declined. But, more important, the absence of entry and exit by firms, a key ingredient of innovation, caused dynamism to suffer and losses to grow over time. Read more »