Your Medicare number needs three more zeros on the end. Want to do that math again?

Over 300 billion dollars for health care for the elderly. I have to assume that back in the early 1960s, either the elderly were that much short of needed medical care, which should have had them dead in heaps fifty feet tall, or that Medicare has replaced an awful lot of other working solutions that were doing most of the job back then.

If all the wealth redistribution in America was only going to the needy, there would be one hell of a lot less of it. I would have no problem with a lot of entitlements if they were means-tested, but the politicians fight that tooth and nail. If only a small portion of the entire population is under their grip, what's the point?

I come off like Scrooge because I focus on entitlements and social programs. However, like Jesse James said, "that's where the money is."

Of the approximately 2.3 trillion dollar budget, 531 billion is Social Security, and 484 billion is Medicare and Medicaid.

Over 99 percent of our future financial obligations over the next several decades fall under these two categories alone. That's not counting ANY other social spending.

While defense spending is no drop in the bucket (almost half a trillion), it doesn't include promises to pay a rapidly growing elderly population in perpetuity.

I fully concur that there are damn few items on that entire list of expenses that couldn't also stand a few cuts.

But it is impossible to deal with the idea of deficits without addressing entitlements. All the other categories of social spending you listed are almost lost in the noise. If this makes me a Scrooge, sorry.

The social spender and liberal, with a heart so big it has to be carried around in a wheelbarrow, sees the faces and hears the stories, and can tolerate no limits on the generosity of the state.

It's the scientist who has to point out that you can't make something out of nothing, you can't eat your seed corn, that wealth is created, not found, that past experience counts for something, and that the numbers, at some point, just have to add up.