This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 26,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. So much of federal spending is now off budget.

It doesn't go through a regular budgeting process and that spending

has contributed mightily to our current debt woes. Jonathan Bidlack of the R Street

Institute discusses how to address it.

We would like the federal government to the extent that it has the capacity to spend that it can under dire circumstances, but broadly we ought to be able to have expectations that the government

spending will be regular, it will be normal, it will go through, perish the thought, a budget process.

But so much of what has come to characterize a lot of government spending ought to be construed

as emergency spending.

We can argue about whether or not a lot of it was necessary, but understanding spending

as normal and emergency is something that we're not really good at.

No, I mean lawmakers tend to not want to plan maybe as much as they should.

I mean, you know, there's been a lot of spending in recent years. plan maybe really saw that coming and then we proceeded to go and spend five trillion

dollars completely unexpectedly and completely off budget. You know we've had many

other things like this that have come up I mean the housing crisis back in you know 2008 2009 frankly a lot of the

war spending that we've had has been off budget both in terms of the the overseas

contingency account which previously existed but you know if you go back to

2000 and you look at congressional budget office you know projections as to what does the budget look like, it was

surpluses as far as the eye could see. And when you ask yourself, well, why isn't

that the case anymore? You know, it's not actually because of what people oftentimes think, which is entitlement spending, for example,

which I think B maybe like to talk about because it's easier to project and conceptualize.

But it's a disaster yeah well absolutely I mean no doubt no doubt

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