The "Federal Spending" pie charts are interesting on a number of levels (the charts are actually from Robert Samuleson, not Greg Mankiew).

The first thing that caught my eye was Samuelson's use of the word "net" to disclaim his figure about interest payments on the national debt. What does he mean by "net?"

The second thing that caught my eye is that he obviously lumps "on-budget" and "off-budget" expenditures together. For those who don't know, Social Security transfer payments (OASDI, Medicare) are normally considered "off-budget" -- not part of the Federal budget because they are separate programs (which actually run a surplus))

But Samuelson brings them back "on-budget" to better make his case -- which seems to be, as one person pointed out, a "sideways swipe at 'welfare'"

But a lot of what Samuelson shows a a huge growth in "Social Security and other payments to individuals" (22% to 60%) is in the "other payments to individuals" part, of which a very large part is federal military pensions (which should go in the "Defense" category, in my opinion) and the biggest elephants in the room: medicaide and medicare, neither of which even existed in 1956.

And the cost of which is driven by the cost of healthcare, not by how many "free bennies" the recipients are getting. As we all know, the cost of healthcare has been going through the proverbial roof (for reasons we can discuss seperately).

I wonder what the pie charts would look like if you took out Social Security and Medicare/Medicaide from both? I know what it looks like for 2007:

http://www.assmotax.org/Data/2007Budget.png

"And the cost of which is driven by the cost of healthcare, not by how many "free bennies" the recipients are getting."

If the end user isn't paying for it then:

healthcare = "free bennies"

http://www.assmotax.org/Data/2007Budget.png

This just list income tax dollars spent, not federal tax dollars. FICA is a another 14% of my income being spent, in addation to the other 20% or so in federal income tax. The spending is spending and the taxing is taxing and there is currently 14,000,000,000,000 in unfunded liablities however it occured. The federal government would also run a surplus if all it funded was military and other constutional government functions, but thats not likely to happen either. So the general public is stuck on a sinking ship (we can argue about how slow its sinking, but it is sinking), and congress already has a lifeboat thru their own retirement system.