The U.S. defense budget serves as a sign of how America has prioritized its global commitments and the bridge between strategy and implementation, where military capabilities define the roles and missions of America’s men and women in uniform. The defense budget has broad global impact, but understanding it is not always easy. As military spending finds its way into the nation’s headlines, learn more about how America allocates resources to support its strength abroad.

The Romney 4 percent Pentagon budget is no “spike”; it’s more like a return to normal, even very constrained military spending given the global mission of America’s armed forces.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident fellow J.D. Kleinke, an expert on health care business strategy and entrepreneurship, explains that contrary to the popular misconception, the growth rate of national health spending has been dropping for a decade.

AEI’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies will host Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter for a timely discussion of U.S. defense budgets, of the changing strategic landscape in the U.S. and the force that this landscape demands.

Austerity measures in Europe have been the topic of a heated and mostly confused debate in the economic world. During the May summit of the leading industrial nations at Camp David, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders pushed for continued European austerity. Keynesian critics argue that these policies destroy economic growth.

In this “Health Care 101” guide, Christopher J. Conover, author of the just-released “American Health Economy Illustrated,” distinguishes fact from fiction and answers some of the most fundamental questions about health care and health spending in America.

New data show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing toward the rate of general inflation, rather than growing higher and higher, as had been the case almost continuously since the 1970s.

While the United States consumes a disproportionate share of global resources devoted to medical care, this global share is shrinking.