This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 6, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President would like to require all federal contractors to disclose all of their political activity.

But is it a move designed to enhance transparency

or merely get a better sense of his own political support?

The Cato Institute's John Samples,

author of The fallacy of campaign finance reform, offers his thoughts.

President Obama has dis floated a trial balloon, as we say here in Washington, of an executive order that would compel disclosure

of independent spending by anybody who runs a business or takes a corporate form and supplies goods or services to the federal government.

Now, since in Washington history is what happened last week, people are tending to forget that there was a

Disclose Act last year that failed and that in the run-up to that voting on the

Disclose Act that a lot of people said, you know, what's a great idea

to overturn Citizens United is to simply prohibit government contractors from spending money

on advertisements on political speech during an election.

It'll have the same effect as banning corporate spending without having to actually confront

the Supreme Court.

Now, that, as I said is a year ago, so nobody remembers it.

And also, Obama is proposing something that's a little weaker and that he's not trying to

prohibit spending but he's trying to force its disclosure and if it disclosure

is forced then people who are going to do the spending have to think about

it a little bit more.

If you're a business that does government business and you're spending money trying to get the president or members of Congress defeated,

...