This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 13, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Paul Ryan's Budget Plan is called Radical and

Breathe taking and how it deals with runaway spending in Washington, but in truth it's a gradual

approach.

And on the subject of bloated military spending, all Ryan has very little to say.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

offers his thoughts.

For the most part, Mitt Romney's budget plan is just a series of stated preferences

about what he would like to happen with respect to military. of in his budget plan is not quite as striking in terms of those proposals but how

does Paul Ryan's budget plan the one that he's been pushing for several years

how does that differ from Mitt Romney's stated preference of more

military spending? Well the short answer is Paul Ryan proposes to spend less than

Mitt Romney proposes to spend. So I've just run the numbers on this this morning.

Actually I've been playing around with this for a couple of weeks and I think the

gap between what Mitt Romney wants to spend, which is 4% of GDP on the base budget.

Of course, the cost of the wars would be extra to that, is somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5 trillion dollars in additional spending above the Ryan baseline.

The Ryan baseline, that's the budget plan that was passed out of his committee and ultimately

passed out of the House but never got a vote in the Senate.

That plan is about $469 billion over 10 years over the current baseline.

Again, that doesn't include sequestration. So there is, it is true, Congressman

Ryan has said that he would like to protect the defense budget from cuts, which basically

in his budget means allowing it to grow

...