This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 29th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are stretching U.S. troops.

Tough talk from the White House on Iran is giving military families little comfort.

Walter Ooy, in an article in the new regulation magazine, asks, should we bring back the draft?

Ooy is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. He played a key

role in transitioning the U.S. military to an all-volunteer force.

We're unlikely to go to a conscript army again in the near future as far as I can tell that

the Europeans are dropping the draft.

We still have it in some of the countries, but it looks like

conscription is on its way out. Now Charlie Rangel, a representative from

New York in November of last year suggested precisely the opposite that he would

like to see a return to the draft is there a racial element at all to Representative Rangel's push for reinstatement of the draft?

I don't think it's a racial element. I think what he would like to do is to get the draft to hit the upper income levels but I'm not sure of that I do not

know Mr Rangel he's been pushing a return to conscription for at least the last 20 years.

You refer to this as a stylized fact and that is the idea that in order to meet recruitment goals

that the military has since the end of the draft gone into slums predominantly in order to

get enough soldiers.

That's the folklore and it isn't true they're not going into the ghettos because with the high quality army

that they want to attract where they want to get at least 60 to 70 percent of their recruits from the upper half of the mental distribution and they want people

with high school diplomas not PEDs.

They're committed to this mechanized army, a high-tech army, and they're not going into the slums.

You know, if you look at where they are getting the recruits from, it is not from the low-income census tracks and I think

...