Facing the Future

This week on Facing the Future, we hear from Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds who specializes in researching Congress. She says the failure of Congress to do the most basic things like pass an annual budget due to partisan polarization and dysfunction weakens the institution and dilutes its constitutionally protected role of appropriating government funds. At the same time, this emboldens Presidents to take unilateral executive actions such as forgiving student loans that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

This week on Facing the Future, excerpts from a special event at the National Press Club in Washington DC celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Concord Coalition's founding. An all-star panel of Concord Coalition alumni featuring Ben Ritz of the Progressive Policy Institute, Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congressional Economist 'Mom' Diane Lim, and Brian Keane of Smart Power look at the biggest challenges to face the US economy and federal budget such as: how to generate more revenue, saving Social Security and Medicare, climate change, immigration reform, and more.

This week on Facing the Future, a special Thanksgiving edition of the program taken from a recent all-star Concord Coalition panel discussion at Fresno State University in California focusing on some of the biggest upcoming challenges facing our economy and federal budget. Reforming Social Security, reducing health care costs, raising revenue and increasing immigration were among the options on the menu that could all help slow the growth of our national debt and increase economic output over the next 30 years.

This week on Facing the Future, we hear once again from internationally recognized expert on infectious disease and epidemiology Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. Osterholm and his colleagues who advised the Biden Administration on the COVID-19 pandemic recently wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times. They make the case that we must learn from our experience and we have so much work to do to invest in our health care and disease surveillance infrastructure. If we don't, we will be woefully under-prepared for the next pandemic and related economic crisis. Plus, we take a look at the latest inflation numbers.

This week on Facing the Future, we try to read the tea leaves from an extraordinarily close midterm election result in 2022. It could have a profound impact on what Congress decides to do about funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, two crucial priorities that lawmakers were putting off until after Election Day. We are joined by American University Professor and former Democratic House Budget Committee staff director Tom Kahn, and financial investment advisor Pete Davis who used to staff the Senate Republican Budget Committee. 

This week on Facing the Future, Concord Coalition Policy Director Tori Gorman fills in as host and speaks with economist Claudia Sahm who has worked at both the Federal Reserve and the White House. Sahm questions whether the Fed is taking the right approach to fighting inflation by raising interest rates so rapidly. The originator of the 'Sahm rule' in economic forecasting says there's a risk Fed's actions might needlessly cause a global recession and put millions of people out of work in the US and abroad.

This week on Facing the Future, we're on the road in Austin Texas for a panel discussion on America's long-term economic outlook. We hear from University of Texas economist and public policy professor James K. Galbraith, who says we need to get used to America not dominating global economic and military matters, and Will Marshall, founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, who says big tech are the innovators of our time and we need to focus more investment on non-college education and training for the jobs of the future.

This week on Facing the Future, we speak to Concord Coalition policy director Tori Gorman and chief economist Steve Robinson about the prospects for an economic recession in 2023 as the Fed raises interest rates to bring down inflation. Prices remain stubbornly high. We also hear from Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, about that organization's state-by-state effort to open up party primaries to all eligible voters in the hopes that it will get us a less ideologically polarized Congress. 

This Week on Facing the Future, we check in with Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President of the Washington DC based Bipartisan Policy Center for a situational awareness update on the growing national debt. It just passed the $31 Trillion mark and with interest rates going up to combat inflation, that debt has become much more expensive to carry. Plus, we'll look at a complicated Social Security Proposal that's somewhat popular but a bad idea.

This week on Facing the Future, we hear from Gordon Gray, Director of Fiscal Policy at the American Action Forum. He has written a new paper with a proposal that could add another 900,000 new Americans to the labor force of this country and reduce the major backlog of legal immigration by making a modest investment in the federal agency charged with processing skilled work visa applications. Gray estimates it could add more than $100 billion in economic output every year.