ZadekpediaDownsizinggovernment.org is a website associated with the Cato Institute and edited by Chris Edwards, who is described on the show as Cato’s Director of Tax Policy Studies and as an expert on federal and state tax and budget issues A Libertarian Infrastructure Plan (2017). The site appears in The Bob Zadek Show only as a referral destination that Edwards names when Bob Zadek asks how listeners can follow his writing, and as the subject of Edwards’s own one-line descriptions of what it contains.
Descriptions given on the show
Edwards first appears on the program as the editor of downsizinggovernment.org, introduced by Zadek alongside Edwards’s authorship of Downsizing the Federal Government and co-authorship of Global Tax Revolution A Libertarian Infrastructure Plan (2017).
The most substantive description of the site comes in a later episode, when Zadek asks Edwards how listeners can follow his writing at Cato. Edwards answers that he is easy to find at Cato, that his writing can be followed on Twitter, and that the website downsizinggovernment.org holds all his writings about the federal programs that need to be cut and why they need to be cut; he adds that his email is on the Cato site and that he hopes people read the writings there to see why spending from Washington should be cut Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
A third episode repeats the formula. Zadek introduces Edwards as Director of Tax Policy at Cato and editor of downsizinggovernment.org, which he says is available through the auspices of Cato, and describes the topic as speaking for itself Debt & Taxes (2021). At the close of that same episode, Edwards again directs listeners: they can Google him, and he runs Cato’s website downsizinggovernment.org, which he says is ultimately about cutting government spending programs and what the solution to the debt and tax problems discussed is Debt & Taxes (2021).
Across episodes
The topic recurs in three episodes — the 2017 infrastructure episode, the 2020 episode on fiscal policy, and the 2021 episode on debt and taxes — and the episodes show no development: in each case the site is named as Edwards’s editorial home at Cato, and in two of them Edwards supplies the same short statement of purpose, that it collects his writings on which federal programs should be cut and why and that the solution it points to is cutting government spending A Libertarian Infrastructure Plan (2017) Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020) Debt & Taxes (2021). Zadek’s framing of the site changes slightly across the episodes — from editor of it in the infrastructure episode, to editor of it and a topic that says it all in 2021 — but no guest or host offers a different account of what the site is or does.