Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future, we get the seasoned perspective of Rohit Kumar to give us some insight on what direction the new Republican majority in the House might pursue when it comes to important fiscal policy choices in the next few months. Kumar is a tax policy expert with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, but also served as a top policy advisor to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. He was around the last time we had a Republican House, and a Democratic Senate and President, and Congress had to act on raising the debt ceiling which is crucial to the economy and budget operations. It wasn't pretty. 

This week on Facing the Future, we speak with University of New Hampshire Political Science Professor Dante Scala about changes the national Democratic party wants to make to its Presidential Primary calendar for 2024 that would have the Granite State lose its first-in-the-nation status. Plus we check in with Concord Coalition Policy Director Tori Gorman and chief economist Steve Robinson about the $1.7 Trillion Omnibus spending package enacted just before Christmas by Congress and President Biden.

This week on Facing the Future, we listen to the best of our program for 2022. This is a year that saw our national debt top $30 Trillion, surging inflation like we haven't seen since the early 1980s, and the largest ground war in Europe since WWII. And all of this with an economy still recovering from the disruptions of the worst pandemic in 100 years. We'll hear from all sorts of economists and federal policy experts who appeared on Facing the Future this past year -  including an advisor to four US Presidents!

This week on Facing the Future, we get the entire Concord Coalition staff on the program to take stock of everything that happened in 2022 that impacted the federal budget and the economy. It was a doozy of a year, with lingering pandemic related supply chain disruptions and a ground war in Europe pushing inflation up to levels we haven't seen in 40 years. The Fed's moves to raise interest rates are making the national debt much more expensive for Congress to carry. We'll review it all plus examine the Santa Claus theory of Congressional budgeting. 

This week on Facing the Future, as the clock ticks down the final days of 2022 and Democratic control of the House, several important tax cuts and credits are set to expire. So can lawmakers strike a deal before the Speaker's gavel is passed to Republicans? We'll hear from tax policy expert George Callas, who was at the center of the action when Congress passed the Trump tax cuts. The individual portion of those cuts is also set to expire in a few years, and we'll get George's take on long-term federal tax policy as well. Because like it or not, we're going to need more revenue to put the federal budget on a more sustainable path.

This week on Facing the Future, we hear from Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds who specializes in researching Congress. She says the failure of Congress to do the most basic things like pass an annual budget due to partisan polarization and dysfunction weakens the institution and dilutes its constitutionally protected role of appropriating government funds. At the same time, this emboldens Presidents to take unilateral executive actions such as forgiving student loans that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

This week on Facing the Future, excerpts from a special event at the National Press Club in Washington DC celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Concord Coalition's founding. An all-star panel of Concord Coalition alumni featuring Ben Ritz of the Progressive Policy Institute, Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congressional Economist 'Mom' Diane Lim, and Brian Keane of Smart Power look at the biggest challenges to face the US economy and federal budget such as: how to generate more revenue, saving Social Security and Medicare, climate change, immigration reform, and more.

This week on Facing the Future, a special Thanksgiving edition of the program taken from a recent all-star Concord Coalition panel discussion at Fresno State University in California focusing on some of the biggest upcoming challenges facing our economy and federal budget. Reforming Social Security, reducing health care costs, raising revenue and increasing immigration were among the options on the menu that could all help slow the growth of our national debt and increase economic output over the next 30 years.

This week on Facing the Future, we hear once again from internationally recognized expert on infectious disease and epidemiology Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. Osterholm and his colleagues who advised the Biden Administration on the COVID-19 pandemic recently wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times. They make the case that we must learn from our experience and we have so much work to do to invest in our health care and disease surveillance infrastructure. If we don't, we will be woefully under-prepared for the next pandemic and related economic crisis. Plus, we take a look at the latest inflation numbers.

This week on Facing the Future, we try to read the tea leaves from an extraordinarily close midterm election result in 2022. It could have a profound impact on what Congress decides to do about funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, two crucial priorities that lawmakers were putting off until after Election Day. We are joined by American University Professor and former Democratic House Budget Committee staff director Tom Kahn, and financial investment advisor Pete Davis who used to staff the Senate Republican Budget Committee.