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More than 50% of us federal spending is in social security, Medicare and Medicaid and it’s debt service. You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to

More than 50% of us federal spending is in social security, Medicare and Medicaid and it’s debt service. You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to get up to 90% but it’s easy to get to “a majority”.

quietsegfault 25d ago
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program. The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
- kasey_junk 25d ago
  Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop. As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
  - quietsegfault 24d ago
    Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome. In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs. Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs. Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories. Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security. The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
    - kasey_junk 23d ago
      Social safety net isn’t rigorously defined in the first place so acting like the definitions are being twisted isn’t a reasonable counter argument. Pick what labels you want to throw social security, Medicare and Medicaid into. That bucket is about 46% of federal spending and increasing fast. It’s quite easy to get to 50% without including debt payments on things that look like social safety nets (snap, aca subsidies etc). More importantly as you point out social security, Medicare and Medicaid are growing as a percentage of the budget (and a percentage of gdp) and are not discretionary spending. Those (and defense) are the only places we have any lever to change US debt other than increasing collection. And it’s not politically viable to change them.
loeg 25d ago
A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.
- kasey_junk 25d ago
  Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt. About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
  - loeg 24d ago
    And CHIP, and SNAP. Whatever. You can certainly say social safety net spending isn't exactly 90%. But it's, you know, most of it.
    - kasey_junk 23d ago
      Chip and snap combined is less than 2% of the budget and shrinking fast. You can tell it’s nowhere near 90% because even if you counted every single non-DoD dollar as social safety net it would only be 84% of the budget.
      - loeg 22d ago
        84% is near 90%!

quietsegfault 25d ago

You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program. The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.

kasey_junk 25d ago
Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop. As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
- quietsegfault 24d ago
  Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome. In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs. Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs. Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories. Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security. The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
  - kasey_junk 23d ago
    Social safety net isn’t rigorously defined in the first place so acting like the definitions are being twisted isn’t a reasonable counter argument. Pick what labels you want to throw social security, Medicare and Medicaid into. That bucket is about 46% of federal spending and increasing fast. It’s quite easy to get to 50% without including debt payments on things that look like social safety nets (snap, aca subsidies etc). More importantly as you point out social security, Medicare and Medicaid are growing as a percentage of the budget (and a percentage of gdp) and are not discretionary spending. Those (and defense) are the only places we have any lever to change US debt other than increasing collection. And it’s not politically viable to change them.

loeg 25d ago

A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.

kasey_junk 25d ago
Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt. About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
- loeg 24d ago
  And CHIP, and SNAP. Whatever. You can certainly say social safety net spending isn't exactly 90%. But it's, you know, most of it.
  - kasey_junk 23d ago
    Chip and snap combined is less than 2% of the budget and shrinking fast. You can tell it’s nowhere near 90% because even if you counted every single non-DoD dollar as social safety net it would only be 84% of the budget.
    - loeg 22d ago
      84% is near 90%!