This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 20, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There is at least one benefit to having a president of one party and a Congress of another,

slimmer budgets and slower growth of government spending.

But as the budget battle rages on in Washington, there are a few gimmicks that hide a few

billion dollars in spending.

Steve Levinsky, Director of Budget Studies at the Cato Institute, explains.

The budget battle that is currently ongoing is over this omnibus spending bill.

What this is, is this large creature that's cobbled together from a whole variety of different

appropriations bills, spending money on pretty much everything the government spends money on, except Social

Security and Medicare.

This is education, these are corporate welfare projects, this is some forms of transportation,

some agriculture subsidies, all packed into one really large bill

there's a variety of problems with this bill just as there are a variety of problems with any large

omnibus bill part of it's that's over 3,000 pages and yet members of Congress had less than 24 hours to figure out what was in the bill.

That's good for people who want to hide things in it, but bad for people who want to try to strip things out that might be damaging to taxpayers in the long run.

The main discussion now is over whether the president should veto this bill or sign it into law.

The reason in some sense we have the battle going on that we have going on is because the

president has actually threatened and has followed up on those threats to veto a

variety of these bills that are now within this larger package.

And so the question is, is this good for taxpayers?

Is a veto threat good for taxpayers?

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