This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 29, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

It is joked that voters don't really know what they want, that they'd like the government

to stay out of their Medicare.

Holster Scott Rasmussen says the people are way ahead of the politicians in terms of knowing what

needs to be done and in many cases how to go about it. His new book is The People's Money. We spoke yesterday.

When you talk about the wisdom of the public, they have a generally good set of instincts provided they're given credible information.

One of the problems we have is we have a political leadership that does not want to listen to

the people and does not want to give voters credible information and that is the source of the problem.

In fact, if you go back, the reason we have a fiscal crisis today is because the political

class has not only ignored the wisdom of voters, they have tried to cover up the spending growth.

In 1974, they passed legislation that changed the way we define balanced budgets and spending growth and all of these things.

And so while it's easy to pick people pick apart individual things,

a great example on the health care field is with the polling over the president's health care law.

Some people will say, oh the voters are stupid because they like this individual part, they like this individual part,

why don't they like the whole thing?

Well, because they don't like the cost and

ultimately that is an important thing. 81% of voters believe that this program

will cost more than projected and that scares them. So for them to know the rest of the

details is not terribly important. What are some areas on the fiscal side where

voters in your opinion have just a particularly clear picture of what's going on and what

ought to be done. Well Social Security is one area and look there's three big

areas of the federal budget national security social security and medicare if you don't talk about those three areas you can't talk about changing the budget. In Social Security,

...