BusinessWeek

It is now a foregone conclusion that China’s economy will become the biggest in the world sometime very soon. According to the World Bank, the size of China’s economy is $10.1 trillion, compared with $14.6 trillion for the U.S., based on purchasing power parity (which adjusts exchange rates to account for the different prices people pay for goods and services across countries). But China is narrowing the gap in a hurry. Over the past 10 years, the annual real growth of China’s gross domestic product averaged 10.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent in the U.S.

But as Shannon Brownlee reported in her book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer: “The company sold billions of dollars' worth of Vioxx over the four and a half years the drug was on the market, most of it after worries ...

With more than 14 million Americans out of work and the U.S. facing the prospect of a double-dip recession, it’s heartening to know that Democrats and Republicans agree on at least one way to kick-start growth: support small business. “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin,” President Barack Obama said in his Sept. 8 address to Congress, unveiling a $447 billion jobs bill.

He made the comments at a forum sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan group that educates the public on fiscal issues. John Buckley, a former House Democratic tax aide, said including growth effects could raise ...

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, part of the New America Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan policy institute, recently outlined 40-plus proposals from House Republicans and various bipartisan panels, including the deficit commission ...

Judged solely on outcomes, the decade-long war on terrorism has been a rousing success. Al Qaeda has been chased out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its leader and most of his lieutenants are either captured or dead. The organization is on the brink of “strategic defeat,” according to both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the director of the CIA. Across the Middle East, support for jihadist violence has plummeted. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not mounted one successful strike on American territory—and has failed even to pull off an attack against U.S.

“This is a real disappointment,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington, said in a statement yesterday. “Markets will not be persuaded by a 'mini-deal' that fails to address the most problematic parts ...

For a country of immigrants, the U.S. remains vexed about how to deal with the fact that people from elsewhere still want to come here. Two successive Presidents have now been stymied in their attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The latest foray is the DREAM Act, a narrow but important piece of the immigration reform puzzle that would, at a minimum, give the children of undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The bill failed in the Senate last December, despite the Obama Administration’s support.

"We prayed the revolution would succeed," says Magdy El Galad, the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, the largest independent newspaper in Egypt. "Because if it failed, we would have been assassinated." A wry smile crosses his face. He's joking, sort of.

“This may be part of Obama's double-down yet again on Afghanistan,” said Steve Clemons, an analyst with the New America Foundation, a centrist policy research organization in Washington. Pakistan's ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, applauded the ...