Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future we'll assess the risks and costs of rising federal debt with Ben Harris, vice president and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. We’ll also get his take on congressional negotiations over a major spending and tax bill and whether the economy is headed for a recession.

This week on Facing the Future the guest is Alex Durante, senior economist at the Tax Foundation. We'll discuss the economic effects of President Trump's tariffs and whether Republicans in Congress can find a way to extend about $4 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts without adding it all to the debt.

This week on Facing the Future, Jessica Riedl, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, joined me to discuss her list of the top 10 federal budget gimmicks and the potential for tariffs to raise revenues, harm the economy or both.

As we went through Riedl’s list of budget gimmicks, it was clear that many of them are in play this year. She mentioned, for example, “fake expiration dates” and using a “current policy” baseline. A key feature of the recently passed congressional budget resolution is the use of a current policy baseline to assume that extending the expiration date of the 2017 tax cuts will have no budgetary effect.

This week on Facing the Future our guest was Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and chairman of the bicameral Joint Economic Committee. He gave us his perspective on what it will take to get the U.S. fiscal house in order, why the budget and the economy are intricately intertwined, and why it is so important to act before a crisis hits. 

We also got his candid take on this year's Congressional budget process, which he said "shows the level of perversity there is on telling the truth about the math.” Concord Coalition Executive Director Carolyn Bourdeaux joined the conversation. 

This week on Facing the Future, we are joined early in the week by David Schweikert, United States Representative from AZ-01. Concord Coalition Executive Director Carolyn Bourdeax joins the show to discuss the latest on the budget, deficit, and more with Representative Schweikert.

This week on Facing the Future, we'll talk with Phillip Swagel, Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget office (CBO). He'll discuss the CBO's 2025 Long-Term Budget Outlook, which makes 30-year projections under current law. There is a lot of debt involved.

This week on Facing the Future, we'll talk with James Capretta, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and author of a recent paper called “Budgeting for Fiscal Sanity.” We’ll ask him how Congress should do that and we’ll also discuss some of the controversies over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

This week on Facing the Future, we'll talk with Ernie Tedeschi, Director of Economics at the Budget Lab at Yale. He is the author of a new study showing the inflationary risk of rising federal budget deficits and debt.

This week on Facing the Future, former CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf of Harvard's Kennedy School discusses the need for making hard choices on the budget and a big gimmick Congress is considering to avoid doing that.

This week on Facing the Future we talked with former Congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux who has been named the new Executive Director of The Concord Coalition. In addition, Bourdeaux will head up Concord Action, a new advocacy organization created to marshal grassroots support for fiscal responsibility.

We began by discussing President Trump’s speech on Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress. Bourdeaux commented that Trump “did make a nice hat tip to a balanced budget, which I appreciated. He said he would balance the budget and he would address the debt. However, the revenues and expenditures that he talked about just don't add up.”