This week on Facing the Future, we looked back at the fiscal developments of 2024 and looked ahead to 2025. Joining me for the discussion were Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson, National Field Director Phil Smith and Digital Media Intern Kyle Duffy. Our special guest star was Chase Hagaman, the original host of Facing the Future who now serves as Economic Development Director at the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
Smith described the fiscal developments of 2024 as “deja vu all over again:”
“The political environment was very frustrating,” he said. “Once again, we had a Presidential election where leaders failed to help educate the people about the importance of Federal budget issues and how things are unsustainable. We need to educate people about these issues and we need to take action at some point. The longer we wait the tougher it’s going to get. We’re running out of runway, and in 2024 we used up some more runway without landing.”
Duffy emphasized the generational shift in how voters get their information. “Whether it’s podcasts or social media posts,” he said, “people are listening to that, at least in my generation, far more than whatever legacy media is saying. People have a lack of trust in institutions. They would rather trust whatever individual they have on their phone screen at the moment. So I think it definitely is a generational shift that’s happening, and in order for this conversation to move to my generation more than it already has. I think we need to engage that kind of new type of media that’s more individualized, and the things that people my age are watching, consuming, and really trusting as a source of information.”
Duffy was referring to Gen Zers (age 12 to 27 in 2024), but Hagaman said this was also “a good time to engage Millennials (age 28 to 43 in 2024) who are starting to have families and starting to get deeper in their career and have a sense of what things cost and what decisions they need to make.”
Hagaman, a Millennial himself, noted that, “We are a generation that went through the Great Recession. We’ve gone through the pandemic. We came of age right around 9/11 and shortly thereafter. So we’ve seen conflict. And now we’re seeing the impacts of inflation, high home mortgage costs and interest rates. We have known debt for a long time, whether it’s student loan debt, or credit card debt or auto loans or mortgages. So if you want to talk about a time to be able to relate these higher level issues to an entire generation, just talk to them about being over-leveraged and trying to navigate long term decisions with those sorts of things hanging over them.”
Robinson warned that inflation and high interest rates could remain problems in 2025. “The Federal Reserve Board is really in a difficult spot,” he said. “They had forecast that they would continue to lower interest rates and inflation would continue to come down, but the economy has remained resilient, or perhaps more buoyant than they had expected. They went ahead and cut the interest rate a quarter point and the markets reacted oddly. The stock market went down, because I think they they were expecting both a cut and a forecast that rates would continue to go down, and the Fed signaled that perhaps rates would not go down as much next year.”
Robinson predicted, “There’s going to be a lot of cross pressures for the economy.” He described inflation as “stagnant at best,” remaining above the Fed’s 2 percent target. “So I don’t think the Fed has accomplished its goal,” Robinson said. “They’ve not completely tamed inflation. The financial markets are spooked. You’ve got the stock market going down and interest rates going up. The 10-year Treasury is back up to 4.5 percent. To Chase’s point, home mortgage rates tend to track very closely with the 10-year Treasury, so I don’t think homeowners and homebuyers are going to get any relief soon. And I’m afraid we’re going to have a potential rebound of inflation. It’s going to be tough for Trump and the new Congress to deal with the Fed, who’s trying to fight inflation at the same time they’re wanting to spend more money and cut taxes.”
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Executive Director Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
