This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 20, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The military budget has for too long been treated too differently from other federal spending and if budget hawks are serious

about cutting spending overall it's time to take a serious look at the military budget.

So says Grover Norquist president of of Americans for Tax Reform, we spoke today.

What Paul Ryan did with the Ryan plan is talk about how to

the turning all of the welfare programs, the means tested programs

as Clinton did into block grants and third Medicare.

So people have tended to focus on the reforms

that he's put into entitlements, where

a lot of the big dollars are.

There's a second focus and that is another focus and that's

war on defense spending.

I'm not a big advocate of making any hero for fiscal responsibility be responsible for everything.

People used to do this to Dick Army.

He would have one good idea and then everybody would have a good idea.

It would insist that Dick Army carry their good idea with them. And so while Ryan has done Yeoman's work on

coming up with ideas of how to bend the cost curve on Medicare, on means tested

programs, there needs to be an entirely new care on means tested programs.

There needs to be an entirely new generation of thinkers

on the hill, hopefully coming off some of the committees

that deal with military spending, coming up with how do we spend on the military more wisely, more

...