This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 30, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's the $55 trillion gorilla in the room,

but the liabilities of Medicare

haven't elicited many specific policy proposals

from Barack Obama or John McCain.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Mike Tanner says neither Republicans nor Democrats can

claim much leadership on reforming a program that now consumes 431 billion tax dollars each year.

Medicare is the second largest government program that we have after Social Security,

but it is one that is growing and will become the largest

ultimately government program and it is one that is in much worse financial shape

than Social Security. We talk a lot about the Social Security problem that has an unfunded

liability only of about 15.8 trillion dollars. Of course that's real money when you start talking

with a T. But Medicare is

unfunded liability if you take the trustees estimate is somewhere around

55 trillion dollars in debt and if you look at the work of my Cato colleague

Jagish Gokle he would put that number closer to around 70 trillion dollars in

debt now we're really talking money now this from the Wall Street Journal, no matter who is elected

to the White House and Congress pressure to act on Medicare is rising as the program grabs

a growing share of the federal budget. Medicare spending hit 431.5 billion dollars last year, nearly doubling in just seven

years, according to the trustees.

What have Barack Obama and John McCain said about how to deal with the, essentially the crowding out that Medicare could do to other parts of the budget?

...