This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 20th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. The military

budget has been the subject of much gnashing of teeth, but the cuts to spending now

being contemplated under government sequestration only take us back to the military

spending of 2006, which was spending of near record highs.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, says

sequestration should move ahead.

The cuts are automatic unless Congress undoes them, which is possible. I don't think it's likely when we talk about why I think it's not likely, but you're right. Let's talk first about how we got here.

The Congress in the debt ceiling deal last summer, created this super committee, the super committee

failed.

Of course, the Budget Control Act also includes caps on spending independent of the super committee's responsibility for achieving

additional deficit reduction.

The sequestration was in addition to those budget control caps, the budget that was just passed out of the house yesterday

exceeds those budget caps by about well between six and seven billion dollars the what they approved

yesterday was a very modest cut below what the House Appropriations and Armed Services Committee had recommended, but it's

still, but it basically freezes spending at last year's levels. It's not even

really a cut. If sequestration were to take effect,

it would cut the Pentagon's base budget back to about where it was between 2006 and and 2007 as I like to point out that was not exactly a

lean year for the Pentagon it does apply just to the base budget of course much of the spending in 2006 and 2007 was for

the contingency, what we now call the overseas contingency operations of the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan.

But the base budget itself, of course, has grown quite dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years,

10 years in particular.

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