Inauguration Week Panels at Dartmouth

This week, we are hosting four panels on opportunities and risks facing the new Presidential administration. My contribution was to yesterday's panel on domestic issues, focusing on budget policy. Here is how I opened my remarks:

Stated plainly, our federal budget policy has been a mess since our first modern experiments with tax cuts in the 1980s. A favorable combination of factors restored some sanity to it in the late 1990s. Our second modern experiment with tax cuts in the 2000s messed it up again.

All the while, the aging of the Baby Boom generation through its peak earnings years made our old-age entitlement programs temporarily less expensive to fund. Its continued aging into retirement and thus beneficiary years will cause Social Security and Medicare to switch to large and growing annual deficits.

So there is serious work to be done, and we haven’t been close to being up for the challenge in at least 6 years. 

The video is available here:



And the other three panels, focusing on global issues, health care, and energy and the environment, can be livestreamed or viewed here.

Enjoy!