At this AEI event, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will deliver remarks on the nation's fiscal and economic challenges.

The exposure of the European banks to the sovereign debt of certain European countries has intensified the current financial crisis in Europe. As a byproduct of this crisis (and to a degree, S&P’s downgrade of United States debt during the past summer), government officials in Europe were unhappy with the judgments of the markets about the creditworthiness of some governments.

Ever since Richard Nixon's call for "energy independence," U.S. Presidents have talked about energy policy, mostly incoherently. Continuing that tradition, President Obama is now crisscrossing the country and giving speeches touting his administration's energy plan, the "Blueprint for Energy Security."

The president offers a list of ideas that fly in the face of fundamental realities.

In "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks," congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI identify two overriding problems that have led Congress — and the United States — to the brink of institutional collapse. Mann and Ornstein call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction.

Presidential candidates campaign with soaring rhetoric, but presidents and their advisers make actual policy with spreadsheets.