TIME Magazine

Does Barack Obama know what he's doing?

Youth. Antisocial, mobile-tapping, Lady Gaga-obsessed layabouts who get off the couch only to riot. What's to like? Rather a lot. In the Middle East and North Africa, youths played a major role in bringing down some long-standing dictatorships. And that may be only the start. A burgeoning young population might help speed global economic growth and be a sign of positive developments in the quality of life worldwide.

In winter, a noxious fog sometimes descends on Kabul that is so acrid, you can actually taste it. It's a toxic brew of fumes from traffic jams and thousands of charcoal fires, and it's a testament to the fact that in the decade since the fall of the Taliban, Kabul's population has gone up sixfold, from 500,000 to about 3 million.

It's rare that those of us concerned about the nation's fiscal course come bearing good news. The federal debt, after all, is as high as it has ever been in the post-1945 period and is growing uncontrollably. Under our best projections, the debt will grow from nearly 65% of gross domestic product today to over 90% by the end of the decade — a level that experts have warned could have dangerous economic consequences.

The unfolding crisis in Japan is marked by uncertainty, but seasoned emergency responders have a clear mission: to promote resilience in survivors. Resilience, in this sense, is a metaphor for the quality of an elastic object that springs back into shape after being deformed. Resilient people and communities are those that recover readily from trauma.

It is too soon to know just how much devastation the Japanese earthquake and tsunami have caused, in human or economic terms. The death toll may climb into five digits. Damage to Japan's nuclear power plants could result in sickness and dislocation for hundreds of thousands more. The country's economy, which has already endured two decades of stagnant growth, is now threatened by a stock-market collapse and a massive increase in national debt.

In a much discussed speech at West Point two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the U.S. should get out of the business of fighting the kinds of open-ended ground wars that it has waged for the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any future Defense Secretary who advocated sending "a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,'" Gates said, quoting Douglas MacArthur.

Megan McArdle rails daily at the liberals making policy and their lapdogs in the press. Along the way, she also takes on the money issues of the Washington day. McArdle writes about everything under the economic sun, from the jobs impact of proposed ...

On Sept. 6, 1791, a government worker named Robert Johnson rode his horse through a Pennsylvania forest. An unlucky man, Johnson. He was assigned to collect the first domestic tax ever imposed by the U.S. government--a whiskey tax designed to help pay down the nation's mounting debt.

TIME contributor Amanda Ripley takes a deeper look at this idea and observes that pretty much every job in America has increased standards of productivity over the past 20 years — except those in the public sector. (Watch TIME's video "Joe Klein in ...