Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future we look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its implications for the U.S. and world economies. Our guest is former Congressman  Richard Swett (D-NH), who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark (a NATO member) from 1998 to 2001. Then we turn our attention back to Washington where Congress is still trying to wrap-up a funding deal for this year, including additional COVID relief and aid for Ukraine.

This week on Facing the Future we'll talk with Richard Jackson, president of the Global Aging Institute, about his new paper, Three Myths about Health Care Reform. The paper explains why cost control of federal health benefit programs is critical to the nation's fiscal future. Then we'll look at the effect of rising inflation on the federal budget.

This week on Facing the Future we talk about political leadership in a time of crisis with David Gergen, adviser to four presidents and professor of public service Harvard’s Kennedy School. With the COVID pandemic lingering, inflation becoming a problem for the first time in decades and a Cold War style crisis in Europe, Gergen has some advice on crisis management for the current president. He also explains why he is hopeful that a new crop of young leaders will rise to the many challenges we face, including slow-moving crises such as climate change and unsustainable debt.

This week on Facing the Future as Congress deals with yet another shutdown threat, we’ll talk about the broken federal budget process with David Lerman, Editor of CQ Budget, Then, I'll look back on Paul Tsongas' victory in the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary with Brian Keane, President of SmartPower, who was a key staffer on the Tsongas campaign and later became The Concord Coalition's field director.

This week on Facing the Future we talk with Rep. Jim Cooper a Democrat from Tennessee and founding member of the House Blue Dog Coalition. After 32 years in Congress and a long record of pushing for fiscal responsibility, Cooper has decided not to run for re-election this year. We discuss this difficult decision and get his take on the challenges ahead. Also, Tori Gorman and Steve Robinson join me to discuss the new jobs numbers and the prospects for a government shutdown.

This week on Facing the Future we get an update on the economic outlook from Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. Last year saw strong GDP growth but an unexpected surge of inflation. We'll look at what comes next.

This week on Facing the Future, we talk to one of the leading international experts on infectious disease, Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.  He was one of six Biden transition team COVID-19 advisors who recently urged the President to seek a new strategy on the pandemic and accept the new normal: the virus will be with us for a long time. 

This week on Facing the Future, we discuss the outlook for inflation with Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors and is now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Jason's op-ed, "Four Reasons to Keep Worrying About Inflation" was published last week in the Wall Street Journal

This week on Facing the Future we look at the December jobs report and what it means for the economic outlook and the congressional agenda. Our guest is Gordon Gray, director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum. Later in the show, Tori Gorman and Steve Robinson join me to discuss Gordon's findings and whether Congress will pass another COVID relief bill.

This week on Facing the Future, we kick-off The Concord Coalition’s 30th anniversary year by talking with political strategist Kitty Kurth, who worked on the 1992 presidential campaign of socially liberal, fiscally conservative former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas. Later that year she became the first employee of the Concord Coalition, when it was co-founded by Tsongas and former U.S. Senator Warren B Rudman. Kurth and I discuss how several of the themes of that campaign became the genesis of The Concord Coalition.