This is the Kido Daily Podcast for Friday, March 17th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The anger over-proposed cuts to housing and urban development should keep one thing in mind, that spending

rollback takes the agency back to just 2014 spending levels.

Vanessa Brown Calder, a Cato policy analyst explains how the feds ought to be cutting HUD.

So the White House released its budget recently and the Trump administration proposed reducing the size of a variety of different agencies,

but one of those is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which it proposes reducing

by 13%,

bringing their total budget to about 40.7 billion.

This sounds like a lot.

It's a $6 billion reduction from 2017, but I think it's a six billion dollar reduction from 2017 but I think it's important to

keep this in context and note that overall these spending cuts are minimal in the

grand scheme of things six billion dollars of cuts is actually equivalent to

about half of a percent of the total government welfare spending in the US in a given year.

And it is slightly, a $40 billion budget is actually slightly more

than the HUD budget outlay was in 2014. So it actually kind of brings us back to 2014 spending,

which doesn't sound quite so dramatic at all.

But nonetheless, this news has generated quite a bit of agitation throughout Washington DC as you can imagine and

especially in areas of the country that benefit heavily from the HUD programs

that are affected. What was the stated aim of HUD?

Yeah, so HUD's purpose is actually to provide housing and housing affordability to Americans

everywhere.

So how do they go about it?

...