This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 31st, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If you want to fix the budget mess in Washington, you can't ignore entitlements.

And if you want to tackle entitlements you should know

that the problem will get worse before it improves.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner is author of the new paper, Bankrupt,

entitlements and the federal budget.

There's been a lot of debate about the spending cuts in Congress right now.

Almost all of those spending cuts are focused on what's called domestic discretionary spending.

That accounts for about 18% of all federal spending.

Another 19% or so is the defense budget.

And then of course you have interest on the federal debt.

But the largest portion, almost half of federal spending,

is made up of what's called entitlement programs.

These are programs that are not subject to annual appropriation.

They're sort of on autopilot.

They just increase every year regardless of what Congress does.

When people use the word discretionary, they're referring to a portion of the budget that has to be renewed every year, but don't we, isn't that also,

our entitlements also discretionary in a real sense well in

a real sense Congress can always cut spending they can cut Social Security benefits

or Medicare benefits and in fact they're going to have to in the future.

The difference between discretionary and entitlement spending is whether or not there's an annual

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