The rapid budget expansion is attributable to welfare policies the new administration promised to implement, such as raising pensions for low-income seniors and widening state health insurance coverage.

The government budget plan for next year has been set at 429 trillion won ($381 billion), up 7.1 percent from this year.

The rate of increase is the steepest since 2009, when the nation struggled to escape from a global financial crisis.

The left is a real danger -- it is right now fighting for an end to free speech -- and Trump can fight back only if he keeps from bursting by growing up. He recently did in a unifying speech to the American Legion.

Pray.

The counter-protester viciousness is backed up by videos, numerous other first-hand witnesses, news accounts and even a tweet from a New York Times reporter. What everyone with open eyes also knows is that antifa, a group of leftist-embraced, antifascist fascists, was bloodily involved. Here is a fierce, violent, vandalizing group that is growing, hitting again recently in Berkeley, California, while neo-Nazis are a mere speck on the current scene.

In virtual unison, they shouted angry Charlottesville questions at Trump, whose main point in angry reply was that both the protesters and the counter-protesters were to blame for the violence. He has been bashed for this as much as for his failure to mention the neo-Nazis initially, but he was incontrovertibly correct. Ask Isabella Ciambotti, a University of Virginia student who was at the scene and is quoted in a New York Times story.

He did that because he is a racist, it was alleged, and, at the least, it was a monumental error. Yet, he quickly did hit the neo-Nazis in a no-holds-barred statement. Then there came a press conference on infrastructure and, when question time arrived, the reporters didn’t care about infrastructure.

When he dwells on Charlottesville while also talking about a government shutdown, treating most news outlets as a monolithic fraud machine and verbally abusing members of his own party, he comes across as a buffoon and makes his own agenda more likely to fail. This is true even though the worst part of how he reacted to the Charlottesville rally was over and done with in short order and the rest of it, while crisscrossed with shortcomings, was pretty much on-target.

Trump has already given it a major push through deregulation and more energy freedom. He has encouraged consumer and industrial confidence through infrastructure ambitions and plans for tax reform. So, in a calm, cool, logical if emotionally appealing way, he should make the case for his ideas.

His harangue was largely about criticisms of how he responded to the racist, neo-Nazi, KKK, alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he was right on some points. But it was essentially me-me-me, off-putting verbosity empowering his critics and weakening his compatriots.

One night, he gives a thoughtful, well-ordered, substantive speech on Afghanistan, but then what happened in Phoenix? At a political rally, he reverted to his worst self, a ranting, raving juvenile.

The situation is similar with both Noh and Lee as they also lack experience, expertise and personal connections in their respective host countries. It is questionable that Noh, a former three-term lawmaker, will be able to help restore Korea-China relations that had been strained over the deployment of a US missile shield system in South Korea only because he is close to the president.

The post of the ambassador to the US will require much more than those nominal experiences, especially at a time when the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations calls for foolproof coordination between the two countries.

Unfortunately, none of the appointees seem to meet the requirement. Cho, who headed a policy think tank that advised Moon during the campaign, taught economics at a university in Seoul. He served as the ambassador to the UK during the Roh administration and also was Moon’s special envoy to the EU and Germany shortly after Moon’s election victory.

Moon’s aides at Cheong Wa Dae insisted that the president may well pick people who share his “governing philosophy.” It is not entirely wrong, but there should be a prerequisite: candidates must have minimum qualifications.

So Moon will have given the US, China, Japan and Russia envoy posts -- which are so important to Korea that they are referred to as the “four surrounding superpowers” -- to people close and loyal to him. It is rare none of the four posts will go to a career foreign service officer.

Of them, both Cho, an economist, and Lee, an international relations professor, have ties back to the administration of the late President Roh Moo-hyun, Moon’s former mentor and boss. Cho was a senior economic adviser to Roh and Lee headed a presidential commission on Northeast Asia.

Moon has yet to name an ambassador to Russia, but reports point to the possibility that the post would also go to another Moon ally, Woo Yoon-keun, a former ruling party lawmaker who now serves as the secretary-general of the National Assembly.

To be exact, all three nominees were selected because they had been major contributors to Moon’s presidential campaign. Both Cho Yoon-je, the nominee for ambassador to the US and Noh Young-min, the nominee for the top envoy to China, had played key roles in Moon’s campaign team. Lee Su-hoon, who was named to be ambassador to Japan, was a senior member of Moon’s transition team.

It is ironic, but the latest ambassadorial appointments of President Moon Jae-in, whose election campaign definitely benefited from the Park-Choi scandal, raised the need for the National Assembly to move fast on the bills to subject nominees for ambassadors to parliamentary vetting process.

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