Adjusted for inflation, the federal government spent more on Medicare and Medicaid in 2011 than it spent on everything in 1960. - David Meyer Wessel

Everyone thinks there's a lot, but there's nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn't want less government. They just want the government to cost less.

For every dollar the United States spends on the military, it spends another nickel on foreign aid, international development aid, and humanitarian assistance. Yet in a CNN poll in March 2011, the typical respondent estimated about 10 percent of the entire federal budget goes for “aid to foreign countries for international development and humanitarian assistance.” The reality: about 1 percent. That’s another problem with budgeting: the public makes woefully wrong assumptions about virtually every aspect of it.

The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable. These deficits that we are incurring on an annual basis are like a cancer, and they are truly going to destroy this country from within unless we have the common sense to do something about it.
"We face the most predictable economic crisis in history."