This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 20th, 2011.

I'm Keela Brown.

Basically every proposal to restore the United States to sustainable federal budgets falls short according to Cato Institute

Senior Fellow Jaganish Goklay, but some are better than others. The Gang of Six proposal

for reducing federal deficits he argues provides some of the weakest constraints on spending.

The Gang of Six Plan targets a reduction in cumulative deficits over the next 10 years by about $4 trillion.

But most of it is supposed to be decided not today but in the future through expedited

action in congressional committees. Today they will schedule a reduction of only $500 billion.

Again, to be spread over the next 10 years so the cuts won't happen right away.

But those cuts are concentrated in Medicare, the Medicare sustainable growth rate formula that is supposed

to reduce physician payments every year have been rejected or those provisions

have been repealed by Congress over the last several years,

meaning if they actually let the cuts go through next year,

the cuts would have to be almost 30% in physician payments.

That's something nobody can actually believe or contemplate.

If this were over 10 years, then we'll be talking about $50 billion a year roughly, probably smaller now, larger later, but they would then

defer judgments about future spending cuts to the same process that has been

unable to follow through on cuts that previous Congresses have imposed upon

them. Right, so the law only provides some guidelines as to how many dollars worth of cuts

the various committees on agriculture or energy or education and so on

so forth would be required to generate.

They don't actually, those cuts are not written into law

...