This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 5th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Barack Obama may attempt to channel Ronald Reagan now that the U.S. House is no longer under the control of Democrats.

Is that likely? Is it even possible? John Samples, director of the Cato Institute Center

for Representative Government, and author of the book The Struggle to Limit Government offers

his thoughts.

One of the narratives floating around is the idea that President Obama now after receiving his shellacking in the midterm elections should do his best

to channel Ronald Reagan.

And what jumped immediately to my mind in reading that was the 1986 tax reform.

You give essentially everybody a talking point that they can take home to their constituents,

but fundamentally you reduce the power of the government to control people through

the tax code.

You also, on average, are lowering tax rates, you know, arguing a little bit back and forth, probably that's a net positive

for liberty and maybe Obama could be on the Democratic side saying, look, we need to keep these

fat cats from exploiting these tax loopholes.

Yeah, I think certainly from Cato's point of view, the 1986 tax cut was really good in a sense

that while it didn't lower taxes it did lower rates and

it also lowered essentially the amount of control the government had Congress Congress had, over the economy primarily.

And it makes sense for Obama right now in a couple of ways.

One is he needs to show or to do things that have some bipartisan basis.

Certainly the 86 tax reform was very bipartisan with Reagan being part of the

leadership but he attracted a lot of Democrats to it or it

...