The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo: Government Budgets, Stimulus, and Public Spending

Lucas and Luna examine why large government IT projects have a 70 percent failure rate, using the UK's National Health Service's abandoned 10-billion-pound patient records system as a central case study. They explore root causes: rigid procurement rules, misaligned incentives between contractors and agencies, and the lack of modular design. The episode also covers how smaller governments are succe...

Episode 53 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into a specific case study: Kansas's 2012 income tax cut experiment. Lucas and Luna walk through the numbers—how the state projected $280 million in annual dynamic growth but instead lost $700 million in revenue, triggering budget cuts to education and infrastructure. They explore why the Laffer Curve logic failed in practice, the role of inelastic serv...

When a hurricane or wildfire destroys a community, the federal government steps in with disaster relief. But the rebuilding process is notoriously inefficient, costing taxpayers 50 percent more than comparable private-sector projects. In this episode, Lucas and Luna examine why FEMA's own data shows that post-disaster reconstruction routinely overruns budgets, from temporary housing to infrastruct...

When a natural disaster strikes, the federal government typically reimburses state and local rebuilding costs — but a 2025 GAO investigation found that disaster recovery projects funded by federal grants come in at an average of 47 percent over budget, with some exceeding initial estimates by 300 percent. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into why: from the 'use-it-or-lose-it' pressure on grant...

Episode 50 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast explores how cities are using land banks to turn tax-delinquent vacant properties back into productive use. Lucas and Luna examine the case of Genesee County, Michigan, which started the first modern land bank in 2002 and has since returned over 10,000 parcels to the tax roll, generating an estimated $50 million in new property tax revenue. They discuss the...

Episode 49 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo examines why government data centers run at just 60 percent utilization on average, wasting billions in taxpayer money on unused servers, cooling, and power. Lucas and Luna dig into a 2025 GAO report that found federal agencies maintain over 8,000 data centers, many with utilization below 40 percent. They compare this to private-sector best prac...

The federal government spends over $3 billion annually on software licenses it never opens — and state and local agencies add billions more. Lucas and Luna dig into a 2025 GAO audit that found one agency alone had $480 million in unused Microsoft Office allocations. They trace the problem to procurement rules that reward buying in bulk, a budgeting culture that treats 'use it or lose it' as gospel...

Episode 47 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo looks at how one American city dug itself out of a pension funding crisis without cutting benefits or raising taxes. Lucas and Luna walk through the specific playbook used by Fort Worth, Texas, which had a funded ratio below 50 percent in 2024. Three years later, through a combination of a dedicated property tax override, a shift to a conservati...

Episode 46 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into a seemingly small but staggeringly wasteful line item: the price the US government pays for standard light bulbs. Lucas and Luna trace how a single General Services Administration contract for 60-watt equivalents costs taxpayers 8 times what a warehouse club charges. They walk through the procurement maze — the Buy American Act, the Trade Agreement...

In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast, Lucas and Luna dig into a specific and costly problem in public spending: the federal government's sprawling real estate portfolio. The US government is the largest property owner in the country, with over 250,000 buildings. But the Government Accountability Office reports that dozens of agencies are using less than 25 percent of their office space, wh...

Every school day, thousands of yellow buses crisscross American neighborhoods — but many are running nearly empty. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into a 2025 Government Accountability Office report that found school districts waste an estimated $4.2 billion annually on inefficient bus routing. They break down the specific case of one mid-sized district in Ohio that, by switching to a dynamic...

Episode 43 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into the mechanics of government debt auctions, using the US Treasury's recent May 2026 ten-year note sale as a case study. Lucas and Luna explain how the auction process determines the interest rate taxpayers pay on the national debt, the role of primary dealers and indirect bidders, and what a high or low bid-to-cover ratio signals about market confi...

In May 2026, Minnesota launched the country's first state-run generic drug manufacturing program, aiming to break monopolies on price-inflated generics. Lucas and Luna dig into how the state identified three drugs where prices had jumped 400% in five years, tracing the supply-chain bottlenecks that let a single middleman control 80% of a market. They explore the legal structure—a state-owned facto...

When a mid-sized American city tried to balance its budget by raising property taxes, it accidentally triggered the fastest local economic contraction since the 1970s. Lucas and Luna unpack the case of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which hiked millage rates by 22 percent in 2023 only to see assessed values collapse, business licenses drop by 14 percent, and sales tax revenue fall below pre-hike...

Episode 40 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast examines a quiet revolution in public pension fund investing: the shift from expensive active fund managers to low-cost passive index strategies. Lucas and Luna break down the numbers behind this trend, focusing on the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which moved over $50 billion into passive strategies in 2025. They explore why acti...

Episode 39 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo digs into government procurement — why public agencies routinely pay two to three times more than private companies for identical goods. Lucas and Luna walk through a concrete example: how the US Department of Defense was paying over $1,000 for a single coffee maker while commercial buyers paid $50. They explore the root causes: outdated regulat...

Argentina was the world's most stubborn inflation story — annual price growth above 200 percent, a currency that lost half its value every year, and a public that had learned to treat the peso like a hot potato. Then Javier Milei took office and did what economists said was impossible: he crushed inflation without a full dollarization. This episode walks through the specific mechanism — how the ce...

Episode 37 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into the absurd world of government procurement: why a simple box of paper clips can cost the federal government five times what you'd pay at an office supply store. Lucas and Luna trace the problem from the 1930s Buy American Act through complex bidding rules, procurement officers who fear auditors more than waste, and the perverse incentives that dri...

When California's state auditor ran a computer match of employee IDs against payroll records in 2025, the result was stunning: over 6,000 people were receiving paychecks even though they hadn't logged into a state system in more than a year. Some hadn't worked a day in three years. This episode walks through how the audit worked, why the overpayments went undetected for so long, and what other gov...

Episode 35 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into the machinery of government debt auctions. Lucas and Luna explain how the U.S. Treasury sells over $5 trillion in securities every year, why it uses a single-price auction format, and what happens when a bidder tries to bid a penny. They walk through a real example: the October 2024 10-year note reopening that had a bid-to-cover ratio of 2.6. Luna...

Episode 34 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo takes you inside the shadowy world of government off-balance-sheet entities — the public corporations, special-purpose vehicles, and quasi-autonomous agencies that let governments borrow without reporting the debt. Lucas and Luna drill into a single concrete case: the UK's Network Rail, which was classified as a private company for a decade desp...

Episode 33 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast explores why government treasuries overwhelmingly borrow short-term debt despite decades of warnings. Lucas and Luna walk through the specific mechanics of how the US Treasury issues bills, notes, and bonds, and why the average maturity of federal debt has fallen from about 70 months in 2001 to under 50 months today. They dig into the trade-off: short-term d...

Why do government IT projects routinely blow past their budgets by 10x or more? In this episode, Lucas and Luna drill into the specific case of California's MyCalPAYS system—a $9 million payroll project that ballooned to over $1 billion before being abandoned. They explore the root causes: optimistic cost estimates, vendor lock-in, changing requirements, and the lack of accountability when project...

In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast, Lucas and Luna uncover a bizarre quirk in government healthcare spending: federal programs like Medicare and the VA can pay wildly different prices for the exact same prescription drug. Using a concrete example—a common cholesterol-lowering statin that costs the VA $12 per month but Medicare Part D $95—they explore how fragmented purchasing power, lega...

Episode 30 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast investigates a strange but costly inefficiency: government health programs in the US often pay far more for the exact same generic drugs than private insurers do. Lucas breaks down a 2025 Government Accountability Office report finding that Medicare Part D paid an average of 2.3 times more than commercial plans for 40 common generics in 2023 — costing taxpay...