From Harvard economist Greg Mankiw's blog. It's a good picture, because it starts to get at why cutting the budget is so difficult. A lot of people think we just need to cut out "pork," but even the anti-pork watchdogs only estimate pork at .5% percent of the budget. So what else is in "Other spending"? A whole lot of it is in stuff people think government should do transportation, energy, treasury, health and human services...
The point is the budget doesn't look very good. And all cuts are painful. Twenty-nine percent of your taxes (actually much more, unless you have a high income) go to pay your grandparents social security and medicare. Fourteen percent goes to interest payments on debt your parents accrued. It's kind of funny to me that so large a proportion of the tea party movement is older people, who get socialized medicine and social insurance payments, when forty-three percent of the budget either goes straight to old people or to interest on debts they accrued by running deficits.
And don't forget old people vote like crazy (what else do they have to do), so most of these programs are untouchable.
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