This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 5th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator John McCain hopes to clinch his party's nomination sooner rather than later on this super, super duper giga Tuesday.

Mike Tanner, Director of Health and Welfare Studies, runs down the good, the bad, and the ugly of John McCain.

Well, let's look first at the good. In terms of being a fiscal conservative, John McCain is the real deal.

It's not just as well-deserved reputation for fighting earmarks and pork barrel spending, but on entitlements.

John McCain has been a leader.

He has been an early and ardent supporter of personal accounts for Social Security. On Medicare he opposed the

prescription drug benefit. He was the only one of the presidential candidates

and one of the very few Republican senators to do so is actually called for

its repeal. He's called

for means testing Medicare. He's an ardent free trader during his time in the

Senate. He's never voted for a tax tax increase I know he's now taking some heat

for having opposed the the Bush tax cuts but he now says that he should be

expanded extended and has called for additional tax cuts.

So on tax and spending issues, he's pretty good.

John McCain's opposition to President Bush's tax cuts

at the time sort of seemed to come out of this sort of

Gerald Ford view of the appropriateness of spending and tax cuts at the same time.

Well John McCain now says that he opposed the Bush tax cuts because they weren't tied to spending cuts. There's actually some reasonableness to this.

For too long, I think Republicans use the idea of cutting taxes as a way of avoiding the difficult choices about the size of government or cutting government spending.

Sort of if you could take away everybody's pain, give them some ice

cream, you never had to really worry about whether they ate their spinach. I think tying them

...