This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 16th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal budgeting process is broken, not that it was great when it supposedly worked well.

Megan McCartle, a columnist at Bloomberg, argues part of the problem is political polarization,

but that doesn't account for all of it.

We spoke this week. Here's how it's supposed to work.

The president makes a suggestion to Congress. Congress ignores that suggestion, drafts a budget,

they bounce it back and forth between the houses,

and they send it back to the president.

When was the last time something close to that happened?

Under George Bush. last time something close to that happen.

Under George Bush.

So let's go back to how this process actually started,

because that's a big part of the story. So the way budgeting used to work

back in the 70s basically the budget process had broken down over something called

impoundment. President Nixon had just decided that Congress would appropriate money

and he would just not spend it if he didn't like what

they'd appropriated the money for.

So Congress got very upset about this,

as you can imagine.

And so they get together and in the mid-70s they pass a big budget act, which totally

changes the process in a number of different ways.

So for one thing, it creates the Congressional Budget Office,

...