This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 10th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Divided government is good for spending restraint and it's looking increasingly like

divided government at the federal level is what we're going to get.

Liz Mayer is a political strategist in Washington, D.C.

For libertarians, she argues divided government is the best you could have reasonably hoped for.

Yeah, I believe that's right. There are a couple of reasons. I think the main one is that

as Cato itself has observed in I think quite a few policy papers but certainly one

that was produced taking a look at Trump's first term,

generally having unified control of the federal government or at least legislative branches in the White House by one party tends to not be very good in terms of controlling spending.

It tends to be when you run up big

deficits, when you increase the debt, when you are just spending lots and lots of

cash, and we saw that in Trump's first term, you know, we saw that in Trump's first term you know we saw that during George

W Bush's presidency and one of the things that's interesting is when you look

at say the Obama presidency when you particularly when you got into a period when he was having

to deal with a Republican Congress.

Or if you go back and you look at the Clinton years when he was having to deal with New

Gingrich in particular, That was actually when spending really came down. And of course

we know under Obama that various fights about government shutdowns and other budgetary fights resulted in the sequester,

which is really Joe Biden's handiwork.

He ultimately was passed with finding a solution to this sort of gridlock and the one that he came up with was the sequester and that was really his job bringing that over the line.

So I think when you look at the overall result where we're going to have a

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