Budgetary Conflict: From Obama to Biden (via Trump)

Beyond Your News Feed: Understanding Contemporary Politics

For this episode, the tables are turned on Beyond Your News Feed’s normal host, Professor William Hudson. Guest host Professor Adam Myers interviews Hudson about federal budgetary politics. Budget issues are very much in the news these days with Democrats internally divided over President Biden’s proposals for increased spending on physical and social infrastructure and Republicans, once again, seeking to derail these proposals through refusal to help raise the debt ceiling. In this conversation, Adams and Hudson try to place the current controversies in the context of conflict over the federal budget going back decades. They explore how the current moment is informed by the budgetary politics during the Obama administration. What is different about current budgetary politics and what happened then?