This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 20th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. The Congressional Budget Office says if

current trends continue, federal debt will hit 200% of GDP in 30 years.

The speed with which total outstanding debt has accelerated in recent years is truly alarming.

But if Congress in the White House woke up tomorrow as debt hawks,

what would that look like?

Cato's Raminabachi explains.

The massive big spending plans that various factions have within the federal government.

We've also talked about the degree to which the United States can afford to make all of these big spending plans.

We have huge amounts of unfunded liabilities to say nothing of the tens of trillions of dollars that the US is indebted to various people and institutions

around the world.

So if Congress were serious, there are, I think to your mind, a few proposals that would put the breaks on the amount of debt that the U.S. is accumulating and the amount of

spending that the U.S. does.

So what are some of the in the pantheana proposals, what are some of the best that you think could be adopted in the US to begin that process?

Yeah. At the most basic level to cut spending immediately should be fairly easy to do because all

it takes is returning discretionary spending back to pre-pandemic levels,

I'm talking fiscal year 2019,

and then even adjusting for inflation,

we are significantly above those levels now and this is actually one of the

priorities that the House Republicans are currently pushing at the debt

limit to say let's return non-defense, so domestic spending programs, which are various

subsidy programs and the government bureaucracy is financed through that.

...