In Sunday's Kansas City Star, Up to Date host Steve Kraske wrote about "the fiscal cliff."
In short, the cliff refers to a series of big choices facing lawmakers in this country that could lead to sweeping tax increases affecting almost everybody and a series of spending cuts that would affect many of us.
If lawmakers can't come to an agreement on what to do -- and there are a lot of folks who predict that's exactly what will happen -- all these cuts and tax increases will automatically go into effect. And if that happens, the expectation of the resulting wallop to the economy would lead to another recession.
In the first half of Monday's program, Steve Kraske talks with David Wessel who writes the Capital column for The Wall Street Journal. Wessel, a regular contributor to NPR's Morning Edition and a Pulitzer Prize-winner is author of Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget.
Read an excerpt of Red Ink here.
David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal's economics editor, writes Capital, a weekly look at the economy and the forces shaping living standards around the world. David has been with The Wall Street Journal since 1984, first in the Boston bureau and then the Washington bureau, where he was chief economics correspondent and later deputy bureau chief. During 1999 and 2000, he was the newspaper's Berlin bureau chief. He also has worked for the Boston Globe and at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. He has shared two Pulitzer prizes, one for a Boston Globe series on race in the workplace in Boston and the other for Wall Street Journal stories on the corporate scandals of 2002. David is a graduate of Haverford College and was a Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University. His book on the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis, "In Fed We Trust," was published by Crown in August 2009. Follow David Wessel on Twitter @davidmwessel
