This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 15th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even with a proposed boost to military spending and few, if any any changes to entitlement,

sets not clear that President Trump is interested

in the kinds of spending reform

that will slow the growth of government.

Cato Senior Fellow Dan Mitchell explains.

With this new Congress and President Trump, how likely is it that we might end up with a spending cap? In his State of the Union address, President Trump seemed to

poo-poo the one area of budget restraint, which was the sequester.

Well, he was not very happy with the defense sequester. He is

proposing to allegedly cut domestic discretionary and keep the overall

totals where they were to start with.

Now of course our main fiscal problem is not domestic or defense discretionary spending

although both of them should be examined with a much closer eye as to cutting

out waste and programs that shouldn't exist.

Our real problem is the entitlement spending, which is why some of us have thought

that some sort of comprehensive spending cap, comprehensive budgetary reform is going to be

necessary in the long run.

Now he, at least on the campaign trail, was very clear to point out we're not going to do anything

with entitlements.

He has a tiny bit of flexibility if he wants on entitlements. He said he doesn't want to cut them, but of

course all the reforms that people are talking about, none of them are that aggressive. They simply

...