Facing the Future

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.  

This week on Facing the Future, we mark the 88th birthday of Social Security, the benefit program that is a real lifeline for seniors and the disabled. Social Security is now in serious fiscal trouble and its Trust Funds may become insolvent just within the next few years. So we looked back at the history of the program as well as into the future at possible solutions to save Social Security with two experts: Concord Coalition chief economist Steve Robinson, and Dr. Charles Blahous, senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This week on Facing the Future, we revisit a conversation from earlier this year with Alex Pollock and Howard Adler, authors of a new book entitled "Surprised Again: The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble." The book examines the recent economic crises, including the COVID related economic shutdown and the Great Recession of 2008-10, and asks why these types of events always seem to take us by surprise. Though inflation has come down somewhat from its peak in the last year, it is still a problem for our economy, brought about in large part by the federal government's responses to the two most recent economic crises. Not to mention the trillions of dollars these crisis responses added to our national debt.