This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 19th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are parallels between the budget fight of 1995 and today,

with one big exception, everything they argued about in 1995, is much

worse now. John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government

and author of the book, The Struggle to Limit

Government, discusses the parallels.

It's only been 20 years and you're sort of reluctant to draw parallels and think that history repeats itself that quickly.

But generally the American welfare state is in the big picture has been in crisis now since

the 1970s really.

So this is another part of that law sort of a 30 40 year

historical period so maybe there is something going on the same kinds of

issues and people and actions may come in a kind of cycle.

The similarities to 1995 are very striking. You have a young inexperienced first term president who has a tremendously bad first midterm. Bill Clinton lost control of the House, so did Barack Obama. And then

you have a surprising Republican majority, particularly in the House, driving policy, driving

the national agenda.

That's what happened in 1994.

And what it struck me about now like then is that the people who were elected

in 1994 and in 2010 have a very strong sense of responsibility to their constituents,

to the issues that they were elected on,

and a sense of a mandate to do something about it,

so they're not here to easily be pushed aside from what

...