Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome. In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security

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.