This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 27, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

The debt ceiling fight is heating up, but virtually every plan on the table increases spending and

increases debt by trillions of dollars over the next decade. At Cato University

last night US Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky discussed the debt fight and other policy issues.

I think corruption in Washington isn't like the Huey Long days.

I don't see people passing around money and bags and that kind of thing.

Maybe I'm not looking in the right places. But I think really the corruption is that

people really don't believe in anything. They don't believe really they are always sort of dumb down to what is possible.

So we, some of us say, you know, the whole budget is a disaster up here and the only way we'd fix it is with a balanced budget amendment.

Immediately all the nays there say you can never do it.

You're never going to get enough votes.

The Democrats won't vote for it.

And so we fight these battles sometimes

dispirited from the very beginning, or sometimes

the leadership in one house will say, well,

we have to raise the debt ceiling.

But when they say that in February,

it takes a little bit of the leverage out of the game if they're already saying we're going to eventually vote to raise the debt ceiling.

But we've been fighting this back and forth, and the biggest problem with it, and the biggest problem with discussions in Washington is they all start from the wrong place.

Everybody says we're going to cut a trillion or we're going to cut four trillion or three trillion.

And you scratch your head and you say, from what? What are they talking about?

Are they really going to cut a trillion dollars? That sounds good.

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