This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 14, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown. The Bush

Obama years have given us dramatic growth in the size and scope of government, but it

gets worse according to Cato Institute Senior

fellow Dan Mitchell. At Cato's Policy Day in May, Mitchell argued that financing

big government may mean value added taxes and other punitive taxes like those in Europe where government's share

of the economy has grown dramatically.

When Bill Clinton left office, the federal government spent 18.2% of GDP, our economic output.

Whatever we produced, and when Bill Clinton left office,

the federal government was grabbing 18.2% of it and

redistributing it, most of course in a very inefficient and harmful way.

And we thought Bill Clinton was a big government enemy.

After eight years of Bush... Clinton was a big government enemy.

After eight years of Bush,

with Republicans in control of the House and Senate

for three-fourths of that time, what happened?

The federal budget virtually doubled from 1.8 trillion to 3.5 trillion.

And federal government spending is a share of GDP, which is probably the best way of actually

trying to measure the fiscal burden of government spending on the federal level,

went up to about 24% of GDP.

An enormous increase, an unprecedented increase. Obama comes into office promising hope and

change and what does he do? He gives us exactly the same spending policies as Bush.

Bush gave us a so-called stimulus in 2008 that didn't work.

...