This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 29, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The struggle over taxes in spending now underway is depressingly narrow

and the prospects for real spending cuts and real tax

reform seem quite poor. John Samples author of the book The Struggle to Limit

Government says reforms in the past have required leaders willing to stand against their own parties.

This debate over spending and taxes seems to in some ways be in sort of a bizarre land that is there's an abject refusal

to reckon with the fact that we have a federal government that is spending well in excess of 20% of GDP and neither side

really seems to be making plans for that number to go down. Right there's this

sense that there's just a brutal fact out there, right?

That spending can't go down any more than what is on the table at any one point.

Part of that I think is the Dems on their side are seen as a party of a certain

kind of spending, government spending. And they are now the idea that they won the election is pretty abroad in the nation.

And so therefore that spending doesn't have to be cut.

And on the other side, the Republicans remain committed to defense spending might accept some cuts but you know a

significant decrease is off the table so you're in a sense you just feel like you're

you have a split government and you just have this brute fact.

The quality of the spending, the necessity, drawing distinctions between vital and non-vital anything you want to talk about.

Not even get lowered getting to libertarian elements.

None of that gets done.

It's just this is our people you sense and we're not going to let them

make any sacrifice or whatever. I mean just a brute fact. Even people like

...