This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 14th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's choice for Vice President brings a level of detail to federal

budget questions that few members of Congress are willing to match. But is that all to

the good? Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, evaluates the fiscal ideas of Paul Ryan.

The most significant thing about Paul Ryan's fiscal approach is that he wants to slow down

the growth of government spending.

Now, not cut it. That's only in the Washington definition of a smaller increase

being a cut. Is he cutting spending? But instead of having government spending grow more than 8% a year,

which is what happened during the Bush years, Paul Ryan in his budgets wants government to

grow about 3% a year.

Now that's not nearly as much as what we would like to do with Cato,

we'd like to actually be cutting government spending. But if you have government grow slower than the private

sector, sooner or later, very good things begin to happen.

Government spending falls as a share of GDP.

More resources are left into control of the productive sector of the economy.

And so, yes yes it's a it's a marked improvement over where

the Republican Party used to be to have someone like Paul Ryan who does want

to do real entitlement reform to have someone like that in a

major position. In some ways I think this burns in the idea that Mitt

Romney is not about cutting the size and scope of government specifically but merely slowing its growth

Merely slowing the growth of government spending sounds like a very modest and incomplete goal

But if we have government grow slower than the private sector, sooner or later we solve our problems and government does begin to shrink as a share of GDP.

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