Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated groups.

In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a...

We already know that our banks remain too big to fail, threatening regular people with crisis. Now, a parallel reality is emerging in the garment trade: Most of our clothing is produced by global enterprises so vast and complex that they are simply too big to supervise.

The inability...

RUSTON, La. -- With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.

Over decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes in jobs that paid just above...

After the shock and the horror comes the speculation: Why did an obviously disturbed young man enter an elementary school in Connecticut and gun down scores of people, many of them children?

We will root through his background for clues: Who raised him? Was he in the military? Did...

The single-most important economic issue of our time has been largely ignored in the course of this dispiriting presidential campaign, namely, the need to generate tens of millions of quality paychecks in an economy now decades removed from having enough of them.

Yes, President Barack Obama talks frequently about the...

One little problem with the compassion thing that Mitt Romney keeps touting in his recent television ads: He doesn't seem to have any.

We can safely assume that he cares about his wife and their boys. He must feel concern for the fellow congregants of his church and...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Ask Vice Mayor Angelique Ashby what pushed her to this point -- the point at which she is openly considering using city authority to seize and write down mortgages -- and she'll tell you about the two school teachers who live on her block.

They had figured...

As Election Day approaches, much of the nation must surely be experiencing Percent Fatigue.

The campaign took shape amid talk of the 99 Percent and the 1 Percent -- the divide delineated by Occupy Wall Street that speaks to how more and more of the spoils of the American economy...

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
By Chrystia Freeland
The Penguin Press
336 pages

Back in the quaint times of the previous economic age--the era before private jets and Manhattan socialites struggling to subsist...

Inevitably and regrettably, China has landed in the middle of the American presidential campaign. Both candidates are now laying claim to credentials as the ultimate guardian against the supposed job-killing, prosperity-destroying juggernaut across the Pacific.

This is inevitable because China's rise and its implications for global commerce are...

DENVER -- The house across the street was the first on her block to go dark. The woman who had lived there for years -- a registered nurse with a solid job -- saw the interest rate on her mortgage surge higher, lifting her payments beyond her means. She fell...

La raison pour laquelle le rideau est désormais tombé sur la campagne de Romney n'est pas le ton de ses propos méprisants sur les Américains qui ont des difficultés, lors d'une réunion privée avec des donateurs de sa campagne en Floride. Nous savions déjà que Romney considérait les...

The reason the Romney campaign is now curtains is not the tone of those disdainful things he said about struggling Americans when he was behind closed doors with campaign contributors in Florida. We already knew that Romney views less fortunate people as losers and parasites.

The reason

CHICAGO –- Two weeks before teachers here went on strike, shutting down the third largest school system in the nation, a teenage boy was shot and killed in a rough neighborhood on the South Side.

At Morrill Math and Science Specialty School, the shooting prompted teacher Monique Redeaux to scrap...

CHICAGO –- On a normal Thursday morning in September, Marcus Turner would be sitting in a classroom at Hyde Park High School, looking forward to the free lunch provided in the cafeteria.

But on this Thursday morning, with more than 26,000 teachers on strike in the nation’s third-largest school...

From the remove of television, the most enlightening way to soak up the now-completed political conventions was to simply mute the sound, absorb the pictures and merely look at who was there.

This is not to slight the speeches, which were by turns stirring and clarifying. There was Paul Ryan...

When President Barack Obama takes the stage this week at the Democratic National Convention, inside Charlotte's aptly chosen Bank of America Arena, he owes us an explanation for why the economy has been working so much better for financial behemoths than it has for ordinary people.

He needs to enhance...

Almost a decade ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney delivered a State of the Commonwealth address in which he struck a now familiar pose. Here was the tough-minded leader come to deliver fiscal discipline. Yet even as he proposed substantial budget cuts, he included a rhetorical nod that now stands out...

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of our most incisive contemporary voices on race, has done a great public service with his latest offering in The Atlantic, a powerful exploration of the racial fault lines that President Barack Obama must perpetually negotiate, limiting his potency on a range of crucial issues.

Mitt Romney would like you to know that he thinks poor people are con artists who don't want to work, and he is intent on protecting you, the taxpayer, from underwriting their depraved lifestyle.

In a Romney administration, the social safety net would be reduced to a few basics: dumpster-diving...