This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 25th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When it comes time for a president's budget to actually land in Congress and go through the usual

meat grinder, the compromises that emerge are often on the

side of more spending for you and more spending for me. But cutting spending demands

more than a compromise on the side of bigger budgets.

Jonathan Bidlack is president of the coalition to reduce spending.

He says the silver lining of inefficient government is there are lots of ways to cut. The constant refrain from me and I think you and other people

who care about spending restraint is that the only way Congress ever

compromises on spending is to give each other more spending. I'll vote for yours if you

vote for mine and that seems to be entirely backwards if you care about spending

restraint and how do we get to a point where in order for Congress people to compromise on spending that they're doing

so in the form of cuts.

Right.

I think there are two components.

I mean one and the most obvious is that you need demand from the electorate.

You need people who care about this issue enough to vote on it.

And we have that sort of, I think, with a segment of the Republican Party, not all.

And we have very little, unfortunately, within the Democratic Party.

And so one big task is just getting people to realize the nature of the problem and to demand solutions along the lines they do with other

policy issues.

The second part of that equation I think is a more technical one which is that we need rules

...