This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 16th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

What binds tea-partiers together is the federal government's profligate spending and accumulation of debt.

What divides tea-partiers is how best to provide security for the U.S. and whether our

wars are justified.

So, says John Samples, director of the Cato Institute Center for Representative Government, it's well past time for everyone

to treat the military as a true fiscal issue.

Well, I think what holds the Tea Party together as a spontaneous movement is the concern about debt and deficits.

There was a concern that was sparked by the health care reform when people began to

Realize about a year ago what that meant and bind together a bunch of

sort of sort of to say this was an actual problem

rather than just something that might happen in the future.

So that that's what binds together a bunch of people who have different views about other things.

Tea partiers are sharply divided on war, that is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I think it's, it would be correct to say that you would expect that many people who identify

that with the Tea Party are going have in the past

supported both the Iraq and the Afghanistan Wars.

It's not clear to me now that those two wars are either

Very salient or important for these people or that the support for it is as

widespread as it was in the past. I think you don't one of the interesting things

is you don't hear people talking much about it in

Tea Party events and you certainly don't at least I have not seen and you don't hear about Tea Party events making the

case for staying the course in Afghanistan or Iraq and in Afghanistan they certainly

...