This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 29th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama's former Budget Director now says that the key to eliminating gridlock

is to make institutions in Washington a bit less

democratic.

For example, tax policy, he argues, should be less responsive to the demands of taxpayers.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Representative Government, comments.

Peter Ozog was the Office of Management Budget

Director for Obama, and so he's now out of office and he's

bringing back his lessons for the rest of us and one of his lessons is that the

Congress isn't working very well but but it should. We need them to govern, we need them to deal with particularly the long-term deficit issue and so on.

So he says, why is it that Congress isn't working well it turns out the Congress isn't

working because the country is polarized and therefore in his view we have to

have changes in American government to make sure that

Congress doesn't have as much power and in fact what he's trying to do is cut electorates the voters out of the policy-making process.

Now, Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution understood that this polarization,

that this kind of gridlock was a likely result of how he wrote the document, how he crafted the Constitution.

Sure, I mean the Constitution itself is designed to prevent simple majority rule. If you wanted an efficient government, you would just

have one chamber and you, I mean, maybe you would have just opted for proportional representation. Instead, we have this

this convoluted complicated process that's designed to elicit broad consent

from the country rather than an efficient outcome.

...