The growth of the Federal budget is an extremely complex problem, with far more variables than the ideological rhetoric of your last couple of paragraphs implies.

For example, "old-age" items, scattered in various places throughout the budget figures you provided (thanks, bookmarked it), increase nonlinearly because of demographics. For example, "general retirement and disability" grew five-fold, while the equivalent for Federal employees grew by a factor of 16. Veterans benefits grew five-fold as well (you'd scream bloody murder if anybody proposed reducing those, right?).

In what's probably a case of synergy, spending on health services and research went up almost forty times--one part of the budget helped grow another part by increasing longevity.

Spending on education went up an order of magnitude. Yet in the 2000 election one of the big issues wasn't whether to increase education spending, but rather, by how much.

Spending on "Administration of Justice" went up by a factor of about thirty. The crime rate's certainly not 30 times higher now, yet any politician who'd propose spending less would be attacked by the Right as "soft on crime".

And here's a punchline for you: Spending on the national debt (i.e., as interest payments) went up by a factor of about 15. Don't forget, those deficits have to be paid off some time, with compounded interest.

I have to stop now, because I'm getting a pounding headache just trying to keep track of all those variables. It's no wonder they call economics the "dismal science"....

But that's part of the problem, I guess: Economics has too many variables to ever really pin down, and that's why people fall back on ideology, or perhaps "metaphysics" is another word for it. "Trickle-down" economics, at the end of the day, is a matter of faith more than mathematics. Sometimes it works, under one set of conditions, but it's a mistake to assume that it will always work, under all circumstances. The '60s and the '80s are not the Oughts.

--Robert