This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 2, 2018. I'm Keelip Brown.

The big picture on federal spending isn't pretty. Tax cuts met with

spending hikes mean unprecedented deficits approaching 5% of GDP. So how does

this end? The Cato Institute's Ryan Bourne comments on our massive and

growing fiscal imbalance and what can be done about it. The CBO has provided a

reasonable term outlook near and longer term outlook for spending and

revenues what were your big takeaways?

Well this is a really interesting publication by the CBO they do it every year and what they do is they adjust their growth

Forecasts if try and figure out the trends in the economy and look at the legislation on the books to try to project what's going to happen to spending,

revenues, debt and deficit over the coming decade. And the big takeaway is that the combination of

recent policy change, the tax cut bill, the cat busting omnibus spending bill,

coupled with the long-term pressures that we've got in terms of spending on entitlement

and the growth of that due to an aging population.

The combination of those two things really means over the next decade the fiscal outlook is pretty dire.

Deficits are projected now to increase to over 5% of GDP over the next five years.

That's completely unprecedented for a long period of peace time and strong economic growth and as a result over the decade as a whole

the debt to GDP ratio which really is the key measure of long-term fiscal

sustainability that debt to GDP ratio is going to increase

to around 96% of GDP so we're talking about the highest level we've seen in terms of

the debt since the Second World War. So we're just talking goes out will push 5% of GDP.

The difference between what comes in and what goes out will push 5% of GDP.

Yeah, that's right.

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