Nate Silver on the Debt/Deficit (health care, federal government, programs, state)

[Dayton Sux]

538 has a great blog post on long-range trends in Federal spending. Some good stuff here:


What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?

That means most of the growth in federal government spending relative to inflation — and essentially all the growth as a share of the gross domestic product — has been because of the increased expense of entitlement programs.

...but there's more!

Another surprise is how little we are paying in interest on the federal debt, even though the debt is growing larger and larger. Right now, interest payments make up only about 6 percent of the federal budget. In addition, they have been decreasing as a share of the gross domestic product: the federal government spent about 1.5 percent of gross domestic product in paying interest on its debt on 2011, down from a peak of 3.3 percent in 1991.

Interesting stuff. He also looks at state and local govt spending....

[Dayton Sux]

Bottom line on entitlements:

...the arithmetic is simple: if we can’t slow the rate of growth in health care expenditures, we’ll either have to raise taxes, cut other government spending or continue to run huge deficits. Or we could hope to grow our way out of the problem, but health care expenditures may be impeding private-sector growth as well.