This is the Cato Dilly Podcast for Tuesday, February 26, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The looming spending cuts under sequestration are small relative to the U.S. economy, just

three one-hundredths of a percent of GDP, but they are somewhat

ham-fisted and indiscriminate, and that's what's driving many of the complaints.

Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute says even those complaints can be dealt with.

March 1st Friday is the deadline where sequestration hits, which means a cut of $85 billion across the government with

half 42.5 billion being cut from the accounts of the Department of Defense. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President and the Secretary of Defense and

everybody else have been on TV and before Congress and on the radio talking about what

a disaster this is going to be for the country and this is the

results of this long winding process of deficit negotiation talks that created the

Budget Control Act and this tax deal at New Year's but this cut

is at least going to begin on Friday. The people who I think are the most

reasonable who talk about this who are still against these cuts to the Department of Defense say, look, it's the manner

in which these cuts are going to occur.

And to be totally clear, the only substantive cuts are in the Department of Defense.

But can you talk a little bit about the manner of the cuts and how much latitude they have to make a cut

here or there to have some sort of judicious process in applying them?

The Budget Control Act says that the sequestration cut now coming March 1st has to be made to every

account.

It has to be equally applied across the board in the departments it applies to, including the Pentagon.

So the leaders of the Pentagon say this means the cut has to be stupid. We have no ability to control it.

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