This is a Kato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. In the State of the Union

address, President Bush laid out a litany of new spending. Bush's only line in the domestic sand was on earmarks.

But as Cato's Director of Government Affairs Brandon Arnold points out, that line in the sand may actually make things worse.

What struck me was that there wasn't really much in the way of new content.

A lot of what we saw was just a rehashing of old ideas, many of which had appeared in previous state of the unions. We saw the Bush wants to reauthorize no child left behind, for instance. He trucked out a health care plan that he

talked about in last year say the union and really didn't have much of an impact in

Congress. Congress pretty much ignored it, though it did have some merit to it in

terms of leveling the playing field between

individual and employer provided health care. He talked about

entitlement reform a little bit how that's still a looming process a looming

problem I should say but he didn't speak about it in the bold terms

that he has done earlier in his presidency when he was very aggressive about

creating commissions and tackling Social Security with a pretty dramatic overhaul.

Now we did talk about earmarks though, which strikes me though as just an enormous red herring.

Oh, that was one of the new policy ideas in this State of the Union address,

that earmarks were a significant problem and

should be tackled.

But as you said, there is a bit of a red herring there.

Because earmarks, first of all, aren't a huge percentage of the overall budget. They're oftentimes egregious waste of taxes. of our

oftentimes egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,

but in terms of the fiscal impact

not as dramatic as say the entitlement issue.

...