Facing the Future

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...

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....

This week on Facing the Future, we'll discuss President Trump's executive order laying the groundwork for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. How would it be funded and what would it invest in? Our guest is Mark Warshawsky, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This week on Facing the Future, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson will explain why the House and Senate budget committee resolutions might not result in their promised deficit reduction numbers. We'll also look at claims of massive Social Security fraud. Then, National Field Director Phil Smith gets some insights from volunteer leaders.

This week on Facing the Future, we talked about the nation’s budget challenges with Barry Anderson, former Deputy Director for Budget Review at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He also served as Deputy Director and then Acting Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Beyond his work on the U.S. budget, Anderson headed the Budgeting and Public Expenditures Division in the...

This week on Facing the Future, we'll look at the debate in Washington over who has the Constitutional "power of the purse." We'll talk with Rachel Snyderman, Managing Director of Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and co-author of a new Q&A called "Budget Impoundment 101."

This week on Facing the Future, the guest is Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute. She recently testified before the House Budget Committee about the daunting long-term U.S. budget outlook. We'll discuss that testimony and what she thinks is necessary to rein-in the growing debt.

This week on Facing the Future, we'll look at the new 10-year budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office and why some of President Trump's early executive orders might portend litigation over the Constitutional power of the purse.

This week on Facing the Future, we heard from Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute on why Zombies are in control of the federal budget and what must be done to break their grip on the future. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joined the conversation. In a new book, “ Beyond Zombie Rule : Reclaiming Fiscal Sanity In A Broken Congress,” Steuerle updates an earlier book with a simila...

This week on Facing the Future, we discuss the budgetary priorities and procedural hurdles facing the new Republican majority in Congress as they try to quickly enact an ambitious agenda. Our guest is Rohit Kumar, Co-Leader of the National Tax Office at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former senior advisor to Senate Republican leaders.

This week on Facing the Future, we looked back at the fiscal developments of 2024 and looked ahead to 2025. Joining me for the discussion were Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson, National Field Director Phil Smith and Digital Media Intern Kyle Duffy. Our special guest star was Chase Hagaman, the original host of Facing the Future who now serves as Economic Development Director at the...

This week on Facing the Future, the Concord Coalition staff looks back on fiscal year 2024 and what to expect in 2025. Our special guest is Chase Hagaman, director of economic development at the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs (BEA) and the original host of Facing the Future.

This week on Facing the Future, Concord Coalition chief economist Steve Robinson explains why the "Social Security Fairness Act" would result in an unearned windfall for a small number of workers. We'll also discuss a new debt limit warning by the Government Accountability Office.

This week on Facing the Future we began by discussing an Illustrative package of 13 federal tax and spending reform options prepared by the Penn-Wharton Budget Model (PWBM). Our guest for this segment was Dr. Kent Smetters, faculty director of the PWBM. Then, Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, walked us through some big decisions on the budget that th...

This week on Facing the Future we'll talk with Christopher Pope, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute about his ideas for slowing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, which account for about 22 percent of the Federal budget.

This week on Facing the Future we looked at how the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate are expected to handle major issues such as tax cuts, tariffs, government waste, and the debt limit. Our guests were Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute and Ben Ritz of the Progressive Policy Institute. There has been a lot of discussion in Washington about the major fiscal cliff coming up at t...

This week on Facing the Future, we’ll talk about the fiscal and economic implications of the election results and how receptive Congress will be to President-elect Trump's agenda. Our guests are Bill Hoagland senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and Tom Kahn professor of budget policy at American University.

This week on Facing the Future, Rachel Snyderman, Managing Director of Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy discusses why the growing debt poses risks in areas such as housing, healthcare and the workforce. Also, Erica Patella, Program Coordinator for the Fiscal Challenge joins us to discuss this year’s competition.

This week on Facing the Future, we'll get a briefing from Marc Goldwein, Senior Vice President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, on the potential fiscal impact of the Harris and Trump campaign proposals. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joins the conversation.

This week on Facing the Future we discussed the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy with Dr. Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a member of the Federal Reserve System’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) from 1991 to 2011. We got his take on the Fed’s efforts to engineer a soft landing and the implications of high debt for the nation’s long-term budget a...