This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 14th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Congressional Budget Office indicates that so-called tax extenders will drive higher federal deficits in debt in the decades to come.

Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argues that CBO's projections about what

future Congresses will do with future revenues shouldn't be made with a straight face.

CBO released its new long-run budget outlook and of course the big takeaway is that the debt situations even worse than it was the last

time they did one of these reports.

Of course the takeaway from some of the journalists that oh it's the fault of tax breaks.

But in reality, if you look at the numbers,

what it very clearly shows, and what CBO even admits

is that our long-run problem exists solely 100% because government is growing faster

than the private economy. Is CBO encouraged to make that clear? One would think that with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress that they would

want the CBO to make it clear that spending is the problem.

The CBO document is mostly dry and technical.

It's 118 pages filled with charts and numbers.

To the extent there's economic analysis, I actually think it leans to the left

because CBO has historically always believed in Keynesian economics in the short run and in the long run they think that what drives the

economy is deficits so if you have a higher deficit that's bad for the economy

because you're crowding out private investment.

I'm sure a little bit of that happens so I don't fully object to that analysis.

But CBO takes it to such a crazy extreme that if you raise taxes, they will say with a straight face that in the long run that's very good for

growth because in theory politicians will collect all the revenue they estimate, they

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