Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future we’ll talk about the long drawn-out Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations process in Washington, which may be finally wrapping up in the next two weeks — or maybe not. With a partial shutdown looming on March 1st, we'll talk to Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President of the Bipartisan Policy Center and former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

This week on Facing the Future we'll examine how policies of the Federal Reserve Board affect the economy and the budget. Did the Fed's "quantitative easing" go too far and last too long?

Our guest is Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from 1991 to 2011.

This week on Facing the Future, our guest was Dr. Phillip Swagel, Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO just released its Budget and Economic Outlook for 2024-2034. Spoiler alert: It's not great news.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll look at the latest economic numbers with a focus on jobs, wages and interest rates. The January jobs report showed a very robust, and surprising, gain of 353,000 jobs, up from 333,000 in December.

Gordon Gray, Vice President for Economic Policy at the American Action Forum will give us his take on what it means.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll take a close look at President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on households with annual income below $400,000.

Our guest is Ben Ritz, Director of the Center for Funding America’s Future at the Progressive Policy Institute. Ritz explains why that pledge is difficult to implement and how it undermines policymaking.

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll look at the congressional tax agenda, both in the next few weeks and into 2025 when a number of provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are set to expire at the end of the year.

Our guide through the congressional tax thicket is Rohit Kumar, Co-Leader of Washington National Tax Services at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former Deputy Chief of Staff to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

This week on Facing the Future, our guest is Rachel Snyderman, Director of Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. We’ll ask her about the fiscal challenges awaiting the winner of the 2024 presidential election and the more immediate challenge of finally passing the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills – something that is now four months overdue.

This week on Facing the Future, we talked with Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, about the breakdown of the congressional budget process.

With another partial shutdown looming on January 19, we discussed why Congress never passes its annual appropriations bills on time, the problems this creates and whether there are any remedies.

Fiscal Challenges for the Next Administration

This week on Facing the Future, we looked back on budget and economic policy in 2023, which was mostly about avoiding crises, and where things stand heading into 2024.

Our discussion featured a panel of Concord Coalition experts, including policy director Tori Gorman, chief economist Steve Robinson, national field director Phil Smith, deputy director Chris Colligan, and media and policy intern Kyle Duffy.