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

In an era of Venmo and FedNow, the U.S. federal government still issues over 140 million paper checks each year. Lucas and Luna dig into why — from the Treasury's legacy payment systems to the 1.2 million Americans who rely on mailed checks because they lack bank accounts. They look at the 2023 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law's push for digital payments, the 2025 Treasury pilot that cut check costs...

Episode 28 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast uncovers a strange asymmetry in US government spending: the Department of Veterans Affairs pays dramatically less for prescription drugs than Medicare Part D does — sometimes two to three times less for the exact same medication. Hosts Lucas and Luna trace the root cause to a 1992 law that explicitly banned Medicare from negotiating prices, a restriction tha...

The US Treasury issues roughly $1.5 trillion in new debt every year. Most people never think about how that actually works. In this episode, Lucas and Luna walk through the Treasury's regular auction cycle — the schedule, the primary dealers, the bidding process, and the surprising role of the 'when-issued' market. They explain why the government can borrow $100 billion in a single day without bre...

When officials in rural Douglas County, Oregon, faced a $2 million shortfall in 2023, they did something unusual: they opened the books to a citizen audit committee. This episode follows how a group of retired accountants, a school teacher, and a small-business owner spent six months digging into property tax assessments, software contracts, and a mysterious line item labeled "miscellaneous profes...

Episode 25 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into the quiet machinery of government loan guarantees — the kind that back mortgages, student debt, and small business lending. Lucas and Luna trace the $2.3 trillion in contingent liabilities sitting off the US federal balance sheet, using the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case study. They explain how the FDIC's deposit insurance fund work...

Episode 24 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into a hidden drain on public budgets: unused software licenses. Lucas and Luna reveal that governments at all levels collectively waste billions of dollars annually on software subscriptions and licenses that sit idle. They focus on a 2025 audit of the U.S. federal government by the Government Accountability Office, which found that agencies spent over...

Episode 23 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast examines the delicate art of pension discount rate assumptions. Lucas and Luna dissect how a one-percentage-point change in the assumed rate of return can swing a city's reported liability by hundreds of millions of dollars. Using the case of the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, they walk through the math that turns a 7-percent assumed return from a forec...

Episode 22 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into a strange but massive line item in federal budgets: intragovernmental payments. Every year, the U.S. Treasury pays itself hundreds of billions of dollars in interest on trust fund holdings. Lucas and Luna unpack how this circular accounting works, why it matters for Social Security and the debt ceiling, and what happens when the government owes its...

Economist John Cochrane argues that fiscal stimulus has a lower multiplier than most policymakers assume. This episode drills into one overlooked mechanism: when the government borrows to spend, it crowds out private investment by raising interest rates. We walk through a concrete example from the 2009 Recovery Act and explain why the CBO's multiplier range of 0.5 to 2.5 is so wide. Lucas shares a...

Episode 20 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into the quiet scandal of official revenue forecasts: the ones governments use to build their budgets. Lucas and Luna walk through how the US Congressional Budget Office, state finance departments, and even local municipalities routinely overestimate revenue by 2 to 8 percent — and why that matters for bond markets, public services, and your tax bill....

Lucas and Luna unpack the fiscal multiplier—the concept that every dollar the government spends should generate more than a dollar of economic activity. But recent data from the Congressional Budget Office and academic studies suggest multipliers are often below 1, meaning stimulus can actually shrink the economy over time. They look at the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the 2021 Ame...

Every year, governments around the world appropriate billions of dollars for projects that never break ground. Lucas and Luna explore the strange economics of 'zombie appropriations' — budget line items that persist year after year with no tangible output. Using the example of India's long-delayed bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, they trace how political incentives, sunk-cost bias, and w...

Episode 17 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into a wonky but crucial question: why do most governments still budget on a cash basis when every private company uses accrual accounting? Lucas and Luna walk through a concrete example—a $500 million bridge project that looks cheap in year one but carries $2 billion in future maintenance liabilities that never appear on the government's books. They e...

When the US government wants to get rid of surplus property — old office furniture, decommissioned vehicles, seized assets — it doesn't just throw them away. It runs a massive, little-known auction system managed by the General Services Administration. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into the economics of government surplus auctions: how the GSA sells everything from used sedans to military-gr...

Lucas and Luna explore the hidden economics of government travel reimbursement rates, or per diems. Using the US General Services Administration's 2026 figures for Washington DC — $316 per day for lodging and meals — they unpack how these administrative numbers become a massive fiscal drag. They trace how per diems inflate costs for conferences, training, and routine field work, creating a pervers...

Municipal bonds are the building blocks of American infrastructure, but the credit ratings on them are often surprisingly misleading. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into a 2025 paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showing that roughly 40 percent of all muni bonds carry a split rating from Moody's and S&P Global, and that the divergence can cost a medium-sized city hundreds of thous...

The US Department of Defense has never passed a full financial audit. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack why the largest single organization in the federal budget can't account for trillions of dollars — and what that means for taxpayers. They focus on the 2025 audit results: the DoD received a disclaimer of opinion for the eighth consecutive year, meaning auditors couldn't verify $3.8 trillio...

This episode dives into the pension crisis facing many US cities, using Houston as a case study. In 2017, Houston faced $8 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, threatening city services and bond ratings. Through a combination of voter-approved reforms, increased employee contributions, and a new governance structure, the city cut its unfunded liability by 40% in just five years. Lucas and Luna...

Episode 11 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast digs into inflation as a hidden tax. Lucas and Luna explain how the U.S. government benefits from inflation by paying back its debt with cheaper dollars, and why this 'inflation tax' hits lower-income households hardest. They walk through the concept of seigniorage, the real-world impact on Social Security recipients, and why central bank independence matter...

Lucas and Luna explore how fiscal rules—legal constraints on government borrowing and spending—shape budget policy in countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Chile. They break down Germany's 'debt brake,' enacted after the 2008 crisis, which limited structural deficits to 0.35% of GDP. They discuss how Chile's structural balance rule helped it save copper revenue during booms, and why even flexib...

Lucas and Luna explore a surprising corner of fiscal policy: the U.S. federal government owns nearly 640 million acres of land — roughly 28% of the country — making it the largest landlord in the world. This episode unpacks the economics of that portfolio: how the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service manage assets worth trillions, why the government collects only ab...

Episode 8 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo digs into the most dramatic fiscal failure at the local level: a municipal default. We use the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy as our anchor — the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history at $18 billion in debt. Lucas and Luna walk through how Detroit got there, what Chapter 9 actually did to pensioners and bondholders, and what it means for cities lik...

In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the durable appeal of infrastructure bonds — from the first U.S. railroad bonds in the 1830s to the surge in green infrastructure debt today. They focus on a concrete case: the roughly $300 billion in municipal green bonds issued globally since 2014, and how cities like Los Angeles used them to fund water recycling and solar inst...

In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast, Lucas and Luna unpack the municipal bond market — a $4 trillion ecosystem that quietly finances schools, highways, and water systems across America. Using the real case of Jackson, Mississippi's water crisis, they explain how muni bonds work, why yields stay low, and what happens when a city defaults. Lucas breaks down the tax-exempt advantage, the rol...

In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna examine the economics behind government subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing, using the CHIPS Act as a central case. They discuss the $52 billion in direct funding, the tax credit worth 25% on capital expenditures, and the estimated cost per job created. Lucas explains the rationale for industrial policy in critical sup...