Richard Epstein the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, weighs in on the politics of the fiscal cliff and the fight over the debt ceiling. He considers the potential consequences of the nation's current debt crisis and wraps up with prescriptions to get the nation back on a sounder fiscal footing.

Charles Blahous is a Hoover research fellow who currently serves as one of the two public trustees for the Social Security and Medicare Programs. He discusses the impact of the fiscal cliff deal, which increased the payroll tax, and how this affects the debt ceiling. Blahous also discusses Medicare reimbursements to doctors and the overall solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Edward Lazear, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, offers insights into the current jobs’ numbers, noting that the US job creation is not able to keep pace with the growing population. Lazear noted four policy areas that would help economic growth: a tax code that is pro-growth; an increase in trade; getting spending under control; and looking at the cost benefit of regulations.

Twenty years ago, at a conference in Pittsburgh, Hoover fellow John Taylor first presented what is now called the Taylor rule (November 1992, Stanford working paper). Then it was difficult to predict those ideas that would be picked up by policy makers and those that would not; no one could have predicted in 1992 that the Fed and other central bankers would still be applying the rule in 2012. Today we know that the Taylor rule proliferated through academia to the trading floors of Wall Street and to the Federal Reserve's boardroom in Washington. Two decades later, the Taylor rule remains a focus for discussions of monetary policy around the world.