This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 9, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The party of Barry Goldwater once stood on principle for smaller government and fiscal restraint.

New evidence points to the GOP now losing a key constituency fiscal

conservatives who believe that budget deficits do matter. The Cato

institutes Michael Tanner, author of the book Leviathan on the right,

responds. the Republican Party

Party traditionally has been an alliance of social conservatives and economic conservatives.

But in the last few years there's been a combination of fiscal irresponsibility, the growth

and spending, growth in big government, combined with an increasing focus on the social issues.

And that has partly driven the economic conservatives out of the party.

And now the Republican Party is increasingly dominated by big

government types and social conservatives. The Wall Street Journal details sort of the

factions even of economic conservatives to those who are extreme tax cutters without regard to deficits

and those who are very concerned about deficits.

They argue essentially that the once dominant deficit hawks who put

balanced budgets ahead of tax cuts are now all but extinct. We need to

understand that it really boils down to the size of government stupid.

What's happened is with supply side economics, which gets much of the economics correct,

it has sort of excused Republicans from having to deal with unpopular spending

cuts.

They've been able to say, as long as we cut taxes, we don't care how much money the government

...