'The Truth About Entitlements'

Projections of budget problems in the future are about health care costs, and there is improvement on that front:

The Truth About Entitlements, by Paul Krugman: As part of another project, I was looking at CBO historical budget data, and realized that you can summarize a lot about all those much-denounced “entitlements” with this figure:

Credit: Congressional Budget Office

Here, income security is mainly EITC, food stamps, and unemployment benefits, plus a few other means-tested aid programs. Health is all major programs — Medicare, Medicaid/CHIP, and at the very end the exchange subsidies.

What this chart tells you right away:

1. The “nation of takers” stuff is deeply misleading. Until the economic crisis, income security had no trend at all. ...

2. When people claimed that spending was exploding under Obama, the only thing actually happening was a surge in income-support programs at a time of genuine distress. People smirked knowingly and declared that everyone knew that the bump in spending would become permanent; it didn’t.

3. If there is a long-run spending problem, it’s overwhelmingly about health care. And we have lately been making remarkable progress on that front.

More on the same topic from the CBPP:

Low-Income Programs Not Driving Nation’s Long-Term Fiscal Problem, by Robert Greenstein, Isaac Shapiro, and Richard Kogan: Low-income programs are not driving the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, contrary to the impression that a narrow look at federal spending during the Great Recession and the years that immediately followed might leave. Lawmakers should bear this in mind as they consider proposals that may emerge in coming weeks for deep cuts in this part of the budget.

Figure 1

Low-income program spending grew significantly between 2007 and 2010 in response to the severe economic downturn, helping to mitigate its worst effects. Since peaking in 2010 and 2011, federal spending on low-income programs other than health care has fallen considerably and will continue to fall as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) as the economy more fully recovers. By 2018, it will — based on Congressional Budget Office estimates — drop below its average over the past 40 years, (from 1975 to 2014) and continue declining as a share of GDP after that. [1]  (See Figure 1.)

As a result, these programs do not contribute to the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. ...