In recent weeks, citizens in many countries suffering from government budget cutbacks have been learning more and more about one of the biggest and most dangerous scams in the world: the global web of tax havens that U.S. and European politicians and bankers have nurtured over the years. The only...

In 2003, Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi agreed with the U.S. and Europe to end his pursuit of nuclear and chemical weapons in order to normalize relations with the West. Eight years later, NATO abetted his overthrow and murder. Now we are asking North Korea to end its nuclear program as...

Let me be the first to wish you a very Happy Happiness Day! In case you didn't know it, today is the first International Day of Happiness, launched by all 193 UN member states. Happiness Day doesn't mean we've arrived at happiness, but it does mean that we've...

I recently published a Washington Post op-ed called "Deficits do Matter" that was co-authored with talk-show host, commentator and former Congressman Joe Scarborough. The piece argues that high and rising levels of public debt are a real concern. It also makes the case that the stimulus packages that...

It is easy for progressives to blame the Republicans for the sequestration and to view President Obama as having waged a last-ditch effort against these cuts. This is too easy. Many have been confused by focusing on Obama's eloquent speeches and progressive vision while missing his actual budget policies.

In his second inaugural address, President Obama offered a stirring vision of the future of America, and the role of the federal government in enabling America to achieve it. He rightly emphasized that "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." An active federal government is needed, he said, to...

I don't want to enter into polemics today with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. There is time enough for that. Today I just want to talk about fact checking. The Journal editorial board is egregious in its misuse of data. It writes what it wants without fact checking. Where...

The White House and Senate have agreed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for 99 percent of households, starving the federal government of funds. Even Mitt Romney could never have accomplished for the Republicans what Obama has just done for them. The Democrats in the Senate would have soundly...

Everyone is confused about the Fiscal Cliffhanger. Obama is struggling to make a deal to prolong most of the Bush-era tax cuts. The Republicans are holding back. Yet if a deal is reached, the federal government and the long-term purpose of the Democratic Party are both likely to be ruined...

I propose a New Years Resolution for America: the retreat from violence in 2013. We ended 2012 witnessing a mentally unstable, 20-year-old slaughter school children using assault weapons owned by his gun-enthusiast mother, who also became his first victim. We watched in shock as an unapologetic NRA urged more guns,...

Today's op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal sheds more light on how conservative elites thoroughly misunderstand and misrepresent the role of government in a decent society. Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, makes an empirical claim that government social spending...

The 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller shows definitively that the Second Amendment is about an archaic issue relevant to 1790, not to 2012. The Second Amendment reads as follows:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right...

The world is on the verge of a great success story: the eradication of polio. If and when successful, polio eradication will be only the second disease in human history to be eradicated, following the spectacular success of ridding the world of smallpox, completed in 1979. There is still ground...

Today, around 2.6 billion people still lack access to decent sanitation (aka toilets). One billion people defecate in the open, if that can be imagined in the 21st century. As a result, kids by the millions die each year of water-borne diseases causing diarrhea as human waste commingles with the...

It's hard to imagine a less satisfactory jobs report at this stage of President Obama's term. The economy is dead in the water. Obama has no plan but to wait for the upturn. Mitt Romney's plan to cut taxes would be disastrously worse, plunging us into a deep financial and...

Today, Ghana's President John Mahama, UK Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell and I travelled to northern Ghana to announce a new five-year development program for one of the poorest regions of West Africa. Our hope is that through public leadership, community participation, cutting-edge technologies, and private investments, the region will...

Investors are awaiting the miraculous delivery from crisis by the ECB and the Fed, but they are waiting in vain. The economic problems in the U.S. and Eurozone are mostly structural, not monetary. Unfortunately ideologues and politicians on both sides of the spectrum are interested in quick fixes rather than...

Co-authored with Sonia Sachs and Prabhjot Singh

In Africa's Millennium Villages (MVs), local communities are taking many actions in health care, agriculture, education, and other challenges to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Their hard work is paying off. In just three years, the mortality rate among children under...

Is it possible to measure the happiness of the world's population? Remarkably it is, and the first World Happiness Report published today does just that.

Even more remarkable is next Monday's United Nations conference on happiness, for which the report was prepared. Last July the UN General Assembly...

One of the unshakable myths of the punditariat is that the federal government is going bankrupt because of entitlements spending, especially spending on Medicare and Medicaid. Each day we hear the drumbeat saying that either we cut entitlements now or we are finished as a nation. This is a stampede...