The Politics of Money: An IFSD Podcast

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Money shapes everything governments do, but most of us only see the headlines. Budgets, deficits, promises made during elections. Decisions announced in Ottawa that quietly ripple across the country. I'm Sahir Khan and this is the Politics of Money, the new podcast from the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy. I think when people, when they hear the word public finance, I think their ears hurt. They want to turn it off. They think it's something

technical, it's something abstract.

But ultimately, it's really about choices. It's about trade-offs that our political leaders must take in order to promote the common good. And it's about following the money in that context and holding people accountable.

Yes. So in every episode, we're going to take a perspective of public finance. We're to try to understand how public finance intersects with politics,

institutions and how systems actually work. No spin, no slogans, just evidence-based conversations on how decisions are made and why they matter.

Yeah, a few years back I got to be Canada's first Parliamentary Budget Officer and there I got to see the power, if you give people in our legislature information that they can use...

they can talk about issues. They can talk about, is this the right fighter plane? What is the cost of war or crime bills? Is this the carbon tax system that we want to have? So they absolutely need that type of information. So we're going to explore how budgets are built, how decisions get made, and how parliaments, media, and citizens oversee and hold governments to account.

Yeah, so if you want to understand, how does money move through the system? How does it, you know, how does it flow through the executive? How does the legislature provide these authorities? How do we track to see, you know, whether or not these programs are actually working? This podcast might be for you. Politics of Money, smart, fact-based conversations for uncertain times.