Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future we talked with Dennis Lockhart, former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He gave us his take on the state of the economy and what might happen in a debt-induced fiscal crisis. Concord Coalition Executive Director Carolyn Bourdeaux joined the conversation.

This week on Facing the Future, former Social Security Public Trustee Charles Blahous discussed the program's deepening financing challenges on its 90th anniversary and explained why postponing action just makes things worse.

This week on Facing the Future, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, explained why he believes the U. S. economy is edging closer to a recession, led by the negative impacts of higher tariffs and restrictive immigration policies. He also weighed-in on the dangers of runaway debt.

This week on Facing the Future, we looked at the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare with Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute. She explained why these programs add to budget deficits despite the misperception that they are self-financing.  

This week on Facing the Future, Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution talks about the possibility of a government shutdown in the fall and whether the spending power is shifting away from Congress toward the executive branch.

This week on Facing the Future, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels joined us to discuss the need to develop contingency plans for a fiscal crisis in the U.S. that he sees as increasingly probable.

This week on Facing the Future, Jim Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute digs into the 2025 Medicare Trustees Report. Then he explains why the federal budget rules are deepening societal differences.

This week on Facing the Future, we heard from two tax experts with different ideological perspectives who have been following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). David S. Mitchell is a senior fellow for tax and regulatory policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and Kyle Pomerleau is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

This week on Facing the Future, tax expert Andrew Lautz, Associate Director for Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, discusses tensions between House and Senate Republicans as they rush to pass a major deficit-financed tax cut bill before July 4th.

This week on Facing the Future, Prof. Philip Joyce of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, explains the high stakes in Washington's battle over the power of the purse and why protecting the Congressional Budget Office matters.