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. Bourdeaux commented that Trump “did make a nice hat tip to a balanced budget, which I appreciated. He said he would balance the budget and he would address the debt. However, the revenues and expenditures that he talked about just don't add up.”

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 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Anderson sees some similarities between the early days of the Clinton Administration in the 1990’s and the current situation.

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 similarly chilling title, Dead Men Ruling. The main theme of both books is that too much of the federal budget has been predetermined by spending and tax decisions made long ago, leaving today’s policymakers and future generations with limited flexibility to make their own decisions.