This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 26, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Over the coming decades federal entitlement spending threatens to crowd out all other federal

spending and a growing share of GDP.

Why not let states deal with it?

States have to balance their budgets and more importantly balance various kinds of spending

against others.

Jeff Myron, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says the alternative to devolving

federal entitlement spending could be much worse.

How are social insurance programs, at least historically dealt with at the state level versus the federal level?

The historical examples of state level welfare programs, social safety net programs, entitlement programs, were that they were far less generous,

came with far more restrictions than the federal programs that we have now.

For example, there were about 30 state level Social Security programs that had developed

by the early 1930s.

They had residency requirements.

You had to have been living in that state for a bunch of years.

You had to have basically run down almost all of

your assets. You had to be very, very poor to qualify. And it didn't pay you much

money at all. So it really was a safety net for the most extreme cases in

contrast to current federal Social Security, which provides not an excessively generous

but a reasonable level of income that people can actually retire on and live on in a reasonable way and comes with far fewer sort of restrictions on who can get it under what conditions you can get it.

So how would the United States transition from where we are now with huge entitlement programs with with projected spending out into tens of trillions of dollars to one in

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