Facing the Future

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.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll have an all-star panel from the Concord Coalition join us to look back on the budget and economic developments of 2021 and what they all mean for the policy debates of 2022. We'll discuss the biggest surprises, what gives us the most concern for the new year and what gives us some hope.

This week on Facing the Future, we discuss congressional dysfunction; whether it has grown in recent years and why it matters. Our guests are former Congressman, Paul Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire and political analyst Matt Robison who co-host WKXL's "Beyond Politics" Then, Concord Coalition Policy Director Tori Gorman and Chief Economist Steve Robsinson join me for a roundup of recent developments on the Build Back Better Act, the debt limit, and inflation.