Where would you like your tax dollars to go?

[popeyespappy]

I thought Social Security was not funded by the government, but by people paying into it?  I'm not sure I trust this graph, then.

Also, I think it's pretty clear we need to increase revenue, not just cut spending.  The current admin will cut revenue by cutting taxes on those who can afford to pay them by quite a lot.  This needs to be reversed.  The top 1% used to pay much higher taxes and get along just fine, and the economy did better as well.

We can find places to make cuts, but cuts alone aren't ever going to cut it (pun intended) if we don't also find a way to pay for the things we do want.

It's a CBO chart for physical year 2016, and I'm not sure I trust it completely either. For example the chart lists interest on the debt at $241 billion, but the treasury has 2016 interest at $432 billion. But that doesn't mean the chart doesn't illustrate my point that total defense spending is less than total deficit spending. Deficit spending remains more than the entire defense budget. The average annual deficit from 2000 through 2016 was $818.66 billion a year. In 2016 alone it was $1.4 trillion.

The chart also shows that social security and medicare tax revenue are only about 75% of social security and medicare spending by a wide margin. Those numbers don't even include medicaid and other mandatory entitlement spending which add almost another $1 trillion to the bill.