For the latest episode of my American Institute for Economic Research podcast, Econception, I talked to Paul Winfree of the Economic Policy Innovation Center. Paul is an expert on the federal budget and has worked on budget policy in the White House and with Congress. We talk about the coincidence of budgetary deadlines that will make 2025 a messy year for fiscal policy. I had talked to Paul for my piece on 2025 for the October 16, 2023, issue of National Review, which you can read here.

In our podcast conversation, we talk about the soaring costs of interest in the federal budget and how the low interest rates of the 2010s were not locked in by the Treasury. Then I discuss how U.S. trade policy can better respond to China. Rather than give up on free trade, the U.S. can and should pursue stronger trade ties with countries outside China’s orbit, which includes most of the world’s population and economic output. Not-China is much bigger than China.

I also talk about why devaluing the U.S. dollar to boost exports, a plan some Trump advisers have talked about, is a bad idea. For that, I get an assist from Patrick Horan’s piece for NR Capital Matters about the “impossible trinity” in international public finance.

And Paul picked the Paper of the Episode, a chapter by University of Maryland professor John Wallis from the 2006 book Corruption and Reform. You can hear Paul describe the difference between venal and systemic corruption and how it relates to what we observe in politics every day.

Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. An easy link to many different platforms is here.