This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, November 18th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Super Committee charged with making some small spending cuts appears unable to achieve even that tiny task.

I spoke with Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds at the Cato Institute's 29th

Annual Monetary Conference earlier this week.

We're about a week out from Congress's

delegated committee, the so-called super committee, trying to come up with some sort of budget deal and they're

making quote-unquote cuts, but nothing seems to have emerged.

It's really quite remarkable.

First of all, that Congress delegated that job,

it's their job, to a so-called super committee.

And that the super committee finds this a major challenge.

I mean the government spending, federal spending,

increased by six percentage points

from the average of the period from 1997 to 2007, federal spending was a little

over 19% of GDP.

It jumps up to more than 25% of GDP during the fiscal stimulus fiasco of 2009.

And again, and yet here we are in 2011 and it's still above 24.

It's only dropped one point.

So the temporary expenditures seem to be like entrenched and permanent.

And the problem is of an order of magnitude much larger than anything they're trying to do here.

We're talking about spending of $3.6 trillion, and they say, well, we're going to take out

...