This is the Kido Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 1st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In his first address to Congress last night, President Trump laid out his plan to hike military

spending and smash the one area of budget

restraint, the sequester.

Ben Friedman is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato

Institute, he comments.

The military budget increase that President Trump proposed the $54 billion is big. It's not as big as he says it is. He says it's

historically high. There have been a number of bigger increases percentage

wise in the past few decades and we don't know really where the money would go within the military.

That increase by the way comes on top of an increase that he'll be asking for in this fiscal

year 2017 of something like $30 billion, probably for the war account, the overseas

contingency operations, and some sort of increase to homeland security spending. So there's going to be actually substantially more,

something approaching maybe $100 billion more spending in security matters.

What does this mean if you include the Pentagon budget and overseas contingency operations and other things?

Where are we historically with respect to military spending.

We're spending now around what we did in terms of cold war highs,

which were achieved during the Korean War,

and in the midst of the Reagan buildup in the 80s

were about that level. So if Trump got this buildup which by the way he

won't from Congress then we would exceed Cold War highs and be back to where we

were sort of at the around the height of the war and

...