Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast. I'm your host Anastasia Glova.

It's a slow week in Washington as everyone celebrates the holidays and rings in the new year,

but for those of you listening this week, I'm featuring the best of Cato Daily Podcast. Each day until the new year

tune in for one of Cato's finest previously aired podcast commentaries.

Director of Budget Studies Stephen Slavinsky is the author of Buck Wild,

how Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government,

a new book that chronicles the rise of out-of-control spending

under the modern GOP.

Stephen is here to talk about his research in today's daily podcast.

Stephen, what is your book about?

Let me just tell a quick story about Ronald Reagan and sort of what inspired the idea generally.

He used to work a fable in some of his speeches where he would talk

about how fiscal conservatives viewed Washington. They would look at him and they'd see

this cesspool riddled with filth and these awful pork projects and government programs.

And they want to get elected to try to change that.

And they get elected and they get to Washington, D.C. and suddenly they're seduced by big government.

Next thing you know, it doesn't feel very much like a cesspool, it feels a lot more like a hot tub.

So the book was really an attempt to try to see and explain why Washington, D.C. feels so much

like a hot tub to so many Republicans. In other words, why were Republicans so willing to sort of sell out their fiscal conservative base?

Essentially, sell out the type of views that got them to power in the first place, going all the way back to Goldwater and then

Reagan.

Looking at the Republican Party pretty much over the past 25 years, you see this general

...