This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 17th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the biggest tax reforms in recent history was a bipartisan agreement between President Reagan and

Congressional Democrats to lower rates and eliminate tax loopholes.

President Obama's new budget would do the opposite.

So says Chris Edwards, director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Most federal budgets have a lot of smoke and mirrors in them. In other words, sort of accounting tricks to make the deficit and spending not look so bad.

This year President Obama's budget is particularly full of accounting tricks.

The administration is going around claiming that they have four trillion dollars of savings and deficit reduction in this budget,

but two trillion of the four trillion was actually the Budget Act last year the new

budget caps that Republicans forced onto the president last summer. Another

trillion dollars or so of the four trillion in supposed savings

is actually the regular and expected reduction in our overseas troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So both parties already agreed to those reductions in coming years.

So for President Obama to claim a trillion dollars of savings from that is also sort of fraudulent.

The main so-called savings that the President has is a trillion and a half dollars of tax increases in coming years. From

Arcado small government perspective of course tax increases aren't savings

at all they're just an excuse for the federal government to spend even more money.

Back in 2008 the year before President Obama took office spending was $3 trillion, total

federal spending.

This year it's expected to be 3.8 trillion. So Obama has increased spending by 800 billion dollars.

And the thing that's disturbing about that is,

...