This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 31st, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Big Bird has latched his yellow rounded talons into the presidential race, and it seems every time the subject of cutting

public broadcasting is brought up, the overwrought rhetoric comes with it.

Trevor Burris, a legal associate at the Cato Institute, comments.

For somebody who's written about public broadcasting, it probably was a nice moment to have Big

Bird claw his way back into the debate over government spending,

federal spending.

Yeah, it's an eternally recurring debate and the really fascinating thing is that all it takes is the mention, the very off-the-cuff

mention during a presidential debate by a presidential candidate for suddenly the hatches

to be battened down and public broadcasters to be fearing for their

funding and for their lives.

This is really the most loose amount of political pressure you can imagine being put on public

broadcasting and it still puts

political pressure on them which is kind of hilarious now we have marchers we have

the million Muppet March coming all because of a candidate mentioning it in

fairness it is highly unlikely that even in a President

Romney administration that public broadcasting would face any cuts at all,

but more important than that, and I'm sure Mitt Romney is sensitive to that,

it's the idea that cutting federal funding to public broadcasting equates to the death of Big Bird.

Yeah, which is not true.

If federal funding is completely cut from public broadcast tomorrow,

...