This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 14th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's Budget Proposal is out and like virtually all federal budgets, it's bigger than the last one.

How does this President want to spend federal dollars?

Are proposed spending cuts and deficit reduction serious?

And if they are, are they politically palatable to the big spending leadership in Congress?

Cato's Chris Edwards comments.

Well, this is President Trump's fourth budget.

Spending will be up 21% in the four years that he has been in the White House.

So one thing that's striking is that President Trump's record so far is a big spending record.

That said, Trump usually includes a lot of very good cuts and reforms in his budget, cuts to farm subsidies and cuts to

Medicaid and cuts to other subsidy programs, privatizing various activities.

The problem is Trump doesn't follow through

on his proposed cuts.

So Trump's Budget Office has lots of fiscal conservatives in it.

They propose lots of good cuts in his budget

but Trump never follows through and as a result Congress takes over and spending goes

up and up. So if you look at like CBO baseline spending and CBO baseline revenues

over the next, however many years,

you see this nice clear difference between the two

and the difference is the budget deficit every year it's massive.

Under the the plans that have been laid out here you see the proposed Trump spending,

...