This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, January 12, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that Congress has done a form of tax reform,

what are the spending cuts?

Jonathan Bidlack of the coalition to reduce spending

discusses some opportunities to cut federal spending,

but he admits there isn't much appetite for it

on either side of the aisle.

So we got tax reform of a sort in December.

And one of the claims about it was that it was going to save a whole lot of people a lot of money and somehow that did not earn any Democratic votes and so now we're on to the far more difficult

subject of restraining spending somehow and I can't imagine that Republicans even among their own caucus will have a great deal of success getting their own people to vote for substantial spending restraint.

What do you think?

Well, I think that's probably a good assessment.

I think the question is always a matter of when, right?

So this is an election year, so you're right.

You know, I don't think there's, it's not like Republicans are going to go and say let's do fundamental Social Security reform this year

But I do think there are ways to advance and sort of deal with our our long-term more structural spending problem.

There's an opportunity for, you know, budget reform and maybe, you know, just sort of

of being able to put some checks in ways and start having people think a little bit more about about tradeoffs.

There are some opportunities for sort of broader scale reforms that wouldn't necessarily force those discussions to happen

within the next year. And I do think there are other areas of good news too.

I mean if you look at for example David Norquist the new underary of Defense, has announced there will be a Pentagon audit.

...