This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 14th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has returned fire in the budget battle in a speech aimed at explaining how he would deal

with the federal budget deficit. Mike Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato

Institute, says the president's talk about getting serious on spending, Rings Hollow given his first two years in office.

In terms of advancing the debate about the federal budget, size and scope of government what did President Obama achieve?

Well this was not a serious deficit reduction or debt reduction speech.

This was largely a campaign speech designed to rally the Democratic base in advance of 2012.

All you have to do is look at the fact that last February, the President proposed a budget that adds $13 trillion to the federal

debt over the next decade. Now he has proposed that he reduced that amount by 4 trillion meaning he's only going to add 9 trillion

or so to the deficit over the next 10 years or 12 years.

Now to do this he's not going to cut spending, he's going to raise taxes

plus something called spending cuts in the revenue code, which means more tax increases, and then if that doesn't work,

he's going to purpoint a commission, which will recommend tax increases. This is not a serious

deficit debt reduction measure. Now what's he responding to, presumably he's

responding to Paul Ryan's budget plan, which again, that plan doesn't really

reduce spending in the long term, it does as a share of GDP.

Well Paul Ryan's plan is a decent starting point.

It would reduce the debt by about 6.2 trillion dollars

over the next decade.

Now it shows what a hole we're in,

that you can cut that much, and we'd still

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