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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

84% is near 90%!

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.

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.

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