This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, April 3rd, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What are the most reasonable assumptions that we can make about paying for the current size of government.

The fundamental truth, according to Cato's Adam Michelle,

is that it is not feasible to try to balance the budget

on the backs of high-income earners.

And spending cuts, while regularly cast is irresponsible

simply has to be a substantial part of the mix. Whenever we have to make

projections, whenever governments have to make projections about this or that issue from climate change to, you know, rivers, to any number of things.

We have to make assumptions.

And what are the assumptions that are built into the Biden budget plan

with regard to taxation?

There's a lot of assumptions that go into any budget, but the main sort of messaging point that the Biden administration wants to make is that high income folks are not paying their fair share and that we can

increase taxes significantly on them to balance the budget. But if you actually look at the

details I think that his budget tells the opposite story. It's actually incredibly difficult to raise large sums of new revenue from high income folks for sort of two reasons. One because they already pay high

income tax rates but secondly I think more fundamentally there's just simply

not enough high incomeincome people in the

United States to cover the current budget deficit and and that becomes apparent

when you actually start sort of trying to add up all these numbers.

So what I have heard is that it is viewed broadly as irresponsible to balance the budget on the backs of recipients of federal spending?

It's often reported as sort of irresponsible or even implausible to suggest that reducing that we can

sort of reduce federal spending as a way to stabilize the federal budget.

...