This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 14th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

John McCain and Barack Obama have talked about spending.

They've talked about the military,

but what have they said about spending,

the military, and Homeland Security?

Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense

and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

Whoever the next president is, we'll have to confront runaway defense spending because of the pressures on the budget but neither

candidate views it as necessary right now to talk in any kind of specific way about

cutting the defense budget. People worry a lot or people who like defense spending worry a lot that

Democrats are going to cut the defense budget, but that has not been the case in recent years.

Democrats have basically said we only lose elections by going after defense spending.

We win on other issues, so we're essentially going to cede the issue to Republicans.

You spend as much as you want, and we'll talk about something else.

And that's been the attitude of the Democratic Congress which hasn't touched

based defense spending although they're against the war in Iraq and that's been the

attitude of Obama who hasn't proposed a single defense program that he

thinks we ought to get rid of, though he's talked somewhat critically about future combat systems, which is the Army's modernization program,

a couple other things, but he hasn't proposed cancellinglling anything and he has signed up for the president's

plan which is underway to expand the ground forces, the army and marines by 92,000 troops which is according to the

congressional budget office going to cost about

108 billion dollars over five years which are already paying for.

...