This week on Facing the Future, we looked at the final federal budget numbers for Fiscal Year 2023 and why the deficit shot up. Then we discussed President Biden’s $106 billion supplemental spending request for Ukraine, Israel and other international priorities. And finally, we heard from Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute and Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget on the threat of rising interest rates and the prospects for a new fiscal commission. 

This week on Facing the Future, we talk with former Congressman and Ambassador Richard Swett about the work he’s been doing with a Princeton University initiative on restoring the Constitutional powers of Congress.

Swett serves on a subcommittee dealing with the power of the purse, something of great interest to The Concord Coalition. Then, we’ll get Swett’s perspectives on how security challenges in Israel and Ukraine might play out.

This week on Facing the Future we’ll look at how Congress avoided a government shutdown on September 30 and whether they’ll be able to do it again by November 17 when the short-term deal they reached comes to an end.

Then we'll look at the latest economic numbers and consider what they mean for the federal budget. Concord Coalition policy director Tori Gorman and chief economist Steve Robinson join me for the discussion.

This week on Facing the Future, we look at the “day of reckoning” that our guest Eugene Steurele of the Urban Institute, says is coming for U.S. fiscal policy. And we’ll also get Steuerle's take on why the budget is, and has been, transferring resources from America’s youth to richer, older generations. Concord Coalition policy director Tori Gorman and chief economist Steve Robinson join the conversation.

This week on Facing the Future we talk with Rich Thau, President of Engagious, a leading firm in scientifically testing and refining the effectiveness of business and issue-advocacy content. The firm has been conducting a series of focus groups across the country with people who voted for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020. What these key voters have to say will help determine who wins the 2024 presidential race. Then, we'll get the latest from Capitol Hill on whether Congress can avoid a shutdown on October 1st.

This week on Facing the Future, we examine the possibility of a government shutdown. If Congress fails to agree on funding levels for the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1st, many government offices will need to close their doors. With less than two weeks to go, negotiators seem far apart and it's not just Democrats vs Republicans. Division among House Republicans has also been a problem. We discuss the state of play with Jon Lieber, managing director of the Eurasia Group and a former senior advisor to Senator Mitch McConnell. 

This week on Facing the Future, we talk to Romina Boccia, Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy for the CATO Institute. Boccia argues in a recent piece that it is time for a new bipartisan commission to take a broad look at the serious fiscal challenges the federal government faces and propose some solutions that would become law directly unless Congress opts out of any of the proposals. This would include everything from how to reduce massive government healthcare spending to raising new revenue and reforming Social Security and Medicare. This idea of a commission has been tried in the past, but often Congress fails to implement any of the reasonable and well thought out reforms. Could this time perhaps be different?

This week on Facing the Future, we catch up with Phill Sletten, research director of the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, a Concord based nonpartisan state budget think tank. Phil walks us through the current state budget snapshot and talks about some of the short and long-term economic challenges facing the Granite State. Though a smaller scale, many of New Hampshire's budgetary problems mirror our national fiscal challenges at the federal level. Plus, we hear from Concord Coalition chief economist Steve Robinson who has just completed a three-part issue brief series looking at the history and future of the Social Security Trust Fund.  

This week on Facing the Future, we hear from Ben Ritz, Director of the Center for Growing America's Future at the Progressive Policy Institute, and one of our more frequent show contributors. Ben has written several interesting pieces including one where he asserts that the Fitch rating agency's recent downgrade of the federal government's credit rating should be a wakeup call for all those concerned about the budget and our national debt - even if the downgrade itself was not warranted. So we talk to Ben about that and also, how is the federal government doing about investing in scientific and technological research and innovation a year after Congress passed the Chips and Science Act.