Quick Link: Why Government Spending Increases

Rod Dreher explains in a short post why the federal budget and the debt ceiling keep increasing. The answer is simple: the budget's discretionary spending can be divided into four parts, Social Security, Medicaid, Military, and Everything Else. Few people want to see cuts in the Big Three (personally, I'd like to see both SS and Medicaid (and other healthcare programs) get the axe, and am ambivalent about the military), and it seems like people over the age of 50 (read: likely voters) get especially irate whenever a suggestion is made to make any changes to either Medicaid of Social Security. A few people clamor for cuts to the military's budget, but even this doesn't seem  like a big enough bloc of people to effect change there. So, we're left with Everything Else, which is largely the part of the government which went on shut-down.