This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 27th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We now know that President Trump is likely to be a big spender, at least with respect to the military, but how does your

member of Congress stack up when it comes to voting for spending?

Jonathan Bidlack with the coalition to reduce spending discusses the group's new

app that lets you drill down on how much spending your

member of Congress supports. Grover Norquist has his famous pledge that he gets

lawmakers at both the state and federal level to sign, and as I understand it, doesn't really

push that hard, but a lot of lawmakers like to be seen as people who are hawks when it comes

to taxes and sometimes they're held to account for having

signed that pledge and you know what had been missing for a long time was the idea that well yeah taxes are it's fine to pledge not to raise taxes

But if you can borrow money that's not a very meaning that's not necessarily a very meaningful pledge to make so the flip side of

that of course is a pledge not to vote for more spending and so tell us about

the tool that you've developed.

Sure, yes.

So you know, our sort of signature organizational program

has been an anti-spending pledge.

And, you know, it's obviously there are a lot of people

who are less willing, I guess, to go on the record and say they're not going to vote for more spending and so we've always had this question of is there something that we can do to put everyone on an equal playing field and really see how much spending they're voting for and And so, you know, we had the idea to create sort of, I guess you can think of it as a spending

only scorecard where we take the estimates provided by the Congressional Budget

Office and sum them up and just sort of cross-reference them with with the votes

that everyone is taking and so about two weeks ago now we launch spending tracker.org

...