Understanding Fiscal Policies, Debt, and Entitlements

We are overwhelmed with diverse perspectives and approaches to fiscal policies that can be confusing. Are we in a fiscal crisis over debt, entitlements, and the federal budget? Such a complex issue, focusing on debt/debt ceiling and entitlements, will be unpacked by NFRPP’s two distinguished economists with different perspectives and solutions. Presentations will be followed by a discussion with NYTimes’ Peter Coy and your questions.

Speakers:

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and heads the Global Economics and Management group. He is on leave from the position of senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Dr. Johnson holds a BA from the University of Oxford, an MA from the University of Manchester, and a PhD. in economics from MIT. Dr. Simon’s latest book Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, written with Jon Gruber, explains how to create millions of good new jobs and make money work for us through public investment in research and development. This proposal has attracted bipartisan support.

Randall Wray is a Senior Scholar and Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and is currently the 2022-23 Mark and Melodye Teppola Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Willamette University. He previously was a Professor at the University of Missouri and the University of Denver and has been a visiting professor in Rome, Bergamo, Paris, Brno, Nankai, Campinas, Bogota, and Mexico City. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Bologna, Italy, in 1986-87 and 1994-95, and at the University of Tallinn, Estonia, in 2016 . Dr. Wray holds a BA from the University of the Pacific and an MA and Ph.D. from Washington University, St. Louis, where he was a student of Hyman Minsky. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory–an approach that focuses on how money really works in a sovereign nation like the USA. Dr. Wray will discuss his recent book, Making Money Work For Us.

Discussant/Moderator:

Peter Coy, our moderator, writes about economics, business, and finance for Opinion in the NYT. Prior to writing for the TIMES, he was the Economics Editor at Bloomberg Business Week. Coy is an alum of Cornell University.