That’s not exactly news – at least not to anyone who has been paying attention to the sorry state of federal finances. Yet to most Americans, the ballooning national debt ($22.3 trillion and counting) isn’t a problem that impacts their daily lives. They won’t directly perceive the cost of another trillion dollars in borrowing in the government’s next fiscal year.

“Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies,” wrote the economist E.F. Schumacher in his timeless clarion call for “Buddhist economics,” penned amid the hippie counterculture of the early 1970s. But it was another visionary economist, as far from hippie culture in both time and ideology as possible, that made the most convincing case for this very concept two centuries earlier — a mind, paradoxically enough, presently celebrated for just about the opposite sentiment.

President Donald Trump's basic misunderstanding of America's trade deficits will continue to haunt American taxpayers after he leaves office thanks to changes made this year to a little-noticed Treasury Department report.

The World Affairs Council of Orange County has organized a lecture/dinner event with world renowned economist Raghuram Rajan. He is the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Chief Economist of the IMF. He will be speaking about his new book, 'The Third Pillar: How Markets & the State Leave the Community Behind.'