Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future, we'll get some policy ideas from three college students who recently took part in an annual Fiscal Challenge competition where teams from around the country devise and defend their own plans for putting the federal budget on a sustainable path. Dr. Mike Aguilar, founder and president of the Fiscal Challenge also joined the discussion.

This week on Facing the Future, we'll look at what happens at the end of 2025 when many of the tax cuts enacted in 2017 are scheduled to expire. What should Congress be doing to prepare for this fiscal cliff? How much would it cost to extend the tax cuts? Are there viable options to offset the revenue loss? We’ll get some perspectives on all these questions from Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

This week on Facing the Future, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson discusses his new issue brief, "The Rhetoric and Reality of Taxing the Rich." Then we'll talk with Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute about his new column explaining that "Major Budget Reform Must Accommodate Legislators' Need to Give Money Away."

This week on Facing the Future, we'll look at the economics of immigration reform with Teresa Cardinal Brown, Senior Advisor for Immigration and Border Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

With the U.S on track to have more deaths than births by 2040, immigration is an increasingly necessary component for a growing economy. Is there a way forward on bipartisan reform?

This week on Facing the Future we hear from Zach Moller, director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. He'll discuss his recent report called, "A Democratic Case for Fiscal Responsibility." We'll also look at the latest numbers on jobs and inflation.

This week on Facing the Future, we look at President Biden's new budget. It has a plausible deficit reduction path but are the policies used to get there plausible as well?

Our guests are Josh Gordon of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute.

This week on Facing the Future our in-house panel of experts, policy director Tori Gorman and chief economist Steve Robinson, will preview the president’s State of the Union Address, scheduled for Thursday, March 7, and the president’s budget submission, scheduled for Monday, March 11.

This week on Facing the Future we’ll talk about the long drawn-out Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations process in Washington, which may be finally wrapping up in the next two weeks — or maybe not. With a partial shutdown looming on March 1st, we'll talk to Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President of the Bipartisan Policy Center and former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

This week on Facing the Future we'll examine how policies of the Federal Reserve Board affect the economy and the budget. Did the Fed's "quantitative easing" go too far and last too long?

Our guest is Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from 1991 to 2011.

This week on Facing the Future, our guest was Dr. Phillip Swagel, Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO just released its Budget and Economic Outlook for 2024-2034. Spoiler alert: It's not great news.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll look at the latest economic numbers with a focus on jobs, wages and interest rates. The January jobs report showed a very robust, and surprising, gain of 353,000 jobs, up from 333,000 in December.

Gordon Gray, Vice President for Economic Policy at the American Action Forum will give us his take on what it means.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll take a close look at President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on households with annual income below $400,000.

Our guest is Ben Ritz, Director of the Center for Funding America’s Future at the Progressive Policy Institute. Ritz explains why that pledge is difficult to implement and how it undermines policymaking.

This week on Facing the Future, our guest is Rachel Snyderman, Director of Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. We’ll ask her about the fiscal challenges awaiting the winner of the 2024 presidential election and the more immediate challenge of finally passing the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills – something that is now four months overdue.

This week on Facing the Future, we talked with Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, about the breakdown of the congressional budget process.

With another partial shutdown looming on January 19, we discussed why Congress never passes its annual appropriations bills on time, the problems this creates and whether there are any remedies.

Fiscal Challenges for the Next Administration

This week on Facing the Future, we looked back on budget and economic policy in 2023, which was mostly about avoiding crises, and where things stand heading into 2024.

Our discussion featured a panel of Concord Coalition experts, including policy director Tori Gorman, chief economist Steve Robinson, national field director Phil Smith, deputy director Chris Colligan, and media and policy intern Kyle Duffy.