[quote=livinincali][quote=SK in CV]I doubt those spending increases you expect are going to happen. You know, federal government growth over the last 3 years has been the smallest it’s been in decades.[/quote]

Great use of picking a good starting point to base your argument. Government spending went up over 15%(3.168 trillion to 3.696 trillion) in one year between 2008 and 2009 so lets use 2009 as our starting point. How about we use 2000 or 2002 as our starting points. From 2002 government spending went up 41% (2515 to 3563) yet government revenue went up 5% (2318 to 2435). Entitlement spending went from 1383 in 2002 to 2053 in 2012 which is an increase of almost 50%. US GDP grew from 11.59 trillion in 2002 to 13.62 trillion in 2012 for an increase of 17.5%.

So where is the big problem in government, it’s right there in entitlement spending. It’s increasing much faster that any of the other categories. GDP growth won’t fix it, tax revenues which are based on GDP won’t fix it. The only way to fix it is to stop growth in entitlement spending or perhaps shrink it.

Guess what the affordable care act (aka Obamacare) does to entitlement spending in the future?[/quote]

Defense spending over the same period went from about $400B to $800B, an increase of 100%.

The biggest portion of entitlement spending is SS. Yet SS collections over those same years exceeded SS spending. That increase in spending is purely a function of more people reaching retirement age. Much of the additional entitlement increases were purely a function of economic decline. Those expenditures will (and already have) decline as the economy improves. There has been no major permanent statutory entitlement expansion in the last 10 years with the exception of the drug coverage for medicare recipients (save for those that have not yet fully gone into effect).