Episode 137: Higher Taxes for the Middle Class? My Interview with Maya MacGuineas (Part 1)

Maya is the President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The committee itself has been around for a couple decades at this point and came about after several members of Congress left and realized how difficult it really is to be fiscally responsible with a government budget. It’s very difficult to govern in a fiscally responsible manner in a political environment because, in many ways, those two things are completely at odds with each other. Fiscally responsible is simply the notion that you will be paying for your budgetary items yourself and not pushing the cost onto the future. Politics puts pressure on politicians to promise as much as possible and defer the cost to someone else. In terms of where we are now, the current fiscal path is dire. We have just come out of one of the times to borrow and borrow we did. The US borrowed $6 trillion in response to the pandemic and the debt-to-GDP ratio is about to reach its highest point in history. The difference between the...