We passed "expensive" a long time ago, particularly with Medicare.

Unfunded liabilities for entitlements right now rack up to about 100 trillion dollars. This is not even a comprehensible number.

From here:

^Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent. ^

^I want to remind you that I am only talking about the unfunded portions of Social Security and Medicare. It is what the current payment scheme of Social Security payroll taxes, Medicare payroll taxes, membership fees for Medicare B, copays, deductibles and all other revenue currently channeled to our entitlement system will not cover under current rules. These existing revenue streams must remain in place in perpetuity to handle the "funded" entitlement liabilities. Reduce or eliminate this income and the unfunded liability grows. Increase benefits and the liability grows as well. ^

Read the rest of the article, and you realize this was written in May of 2008. Back when the CBO projected that we were going to be heading into budget surpluses by 2012.

The experiment is over, ER. The New Deal is sinking fast. We're trying to figure out how to get everyone into the lifeboats at this point. "Everybody sacrifices" is a great buzz phrase, but I notice nobody wants to get within five parsecs of the actual math.