Members of the Federal Open Market Committee meet this week to consider a range of unconventional tools for additional monetary stimulus.

Let’s face it: If the president had a plan to create jobs, he wouldn’t have kept it under wraps until now. Why take flak from Republicans and heat from the public if you have what it takes to turn the economy and labor market around?

Investors around the world are waiting to find out whether Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke puts any QE3 in his opening remarks today at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole conference. It was one year ago at the same event that he outlined the Fed’s policy options for an ailing economy, including a second round of quantitative easing that started in early November.

When Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S.’s long-term credit rating from AAA to AA+ on Aug. 5, Washington went on the offensive.

When a patient walks into a doctor’s office complaining of a chronic condition, the first thing the physician does is take a medical history.

When George W. Bush took up residence in the White House in January 2001, total U.S. debt stood at $5.95 trillion. Last week it was $14.3 trillion, with $2.4 trillion freshly authorized by Congress Tuesday.

The president's aides made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows this week and gave us a taste of the Democratic talking points for the 2012 election. Asked why, in the face of almost $1 trillion in stimulus spending, the U.S. economy stalled out in the first half of the year -- real GDP growth averaged 0.85 percent -- administration officials fell back on that old standby, "uncertainty."

I’m sitting at my computer, watching the national debt clock tick relentlessly higher, as if to challenge me to make mental computations. How long does it take the U.S. to accumulate an additional $1,000 in debt?

Looking beyond the debt-limit shenanigans preoccupying Washington, the big issue for the U.S. economy is long-term unemployment and what to do about it.

Failure to raise the U.S.’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by Aug. 2 “could plunge the world economy back in recession,” President Barack Obama said. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called it “unthinkably damaging,” and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said congressional inaction could result in “a huge financial calamity.”