This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 30th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are a couple of reasons to be hopeful in 2015 when it comes to federal spending.

For one, divided government often means flat spending.

Jonathan Bidlack is president of the coalition to reduce spending.

Ahead of the new Congress, we talked about how the new balance of power might play out in the new year.

Yeah, so I think the answer is that it's both good news and bad news.

So on the one hand, you know, one of the things that there's a lot of evidence for is this idea that divided government is good for limited government.

And so, you know, if you look at in the 1990s, for example, some people give Bill Clinton credit for balancing the budget and some people give Newt Gingrich

and the Republican Congress credit.

And the reality is that it was probably this joint dynamic that led to the fiscal outcomes

that we have.

And so now what you're describing is a similar

situation we have a Democratic president and we have a Republican Congress and so perhaps

that ends up being good for restricting spending. Now that said I think that the the sort of the thing that would give me

pause and probably gives a lot of your listeners pause is that a lot of the people who

were elected this cycle are not necessarily as committed to fiscal conservatism as say the Tea Party wave in 2010.

And so there was this sort of dynamic I think that played out this electoral cycle whereby a lot of people were

focused very much on we need to elect Republicans regardless of who those Republicans

are and sort of where they are ideologically and so how that all plays out in the

next two years particularly against a backdrop where Republicans are going to be at risk of losing the Senate in 2016 just because they have a situation where many of them are going to be coming up for re-election.

How that all plays out in terms of spending is anyone's guess.

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