This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 30th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The long-term U.S. fiscal crunch is now clearer than ever, and the tough choices

lawmakers must make about taxing and

spending will leave us all better off. That's the argument from Kevin Williamson

author of the new book The End is Near and it's going to be awesome.

Now going broke will leave America richer, happier, and more secure.

The United States faces huge fiscal problems.

A lot of bills are coming due that were promised long ago that we wouldn't have to worry about

it.

States have pension promises that they've made and the trillions of dollars that are beginning

to come due. What is the upside of that?

Well the upside of it is that we have a lot of political creations, things like Social

Security, things like Medicare, things like the state,

employees unions and their political activities that are going to go away.

And that's a good thing because they don't actually work, they don't solve the problems

they're

intended to solve. They take a lot of capital and energy and resources and human

action that could be put into useful and constructive and productive things and for them away on politics and the starvation

and disappearance of these things I think will allow us to create a different kind of approach to social problems that will be not only more to our liking politically as

Libertarian-leaning people, but that will also actually address the problems that they're intended to address to actually alleviate poverty and what's associated with it to take care of things like education and health care for people who can't do it for themselves.

Now getting rid of those things in

...