Democrats and Republicans both voted for the bankster bailouts. It was one of the few non-partisan issues in the last decade. And the drops in GDP plus tax breaks miscalled "stimulus" have literally broken the checkbook. There's a chart somewhere of actual components of the budget yoy, and it's easy to see the bits both sides want to grow.
Nearly all charts are done poorly because the people doing them are partisan. They'll leave off the notion of constant dollars, or they'll use the insane chained dollars (it should be worth this so we'll count it in the GDP as if it cost more - ghost money, IOW), or they'll fudge dates like crazy, or just ignore stuff like "emergency" appropriations bills and say "that's not part of the budget". Common examples of this include ignoring the fact that the first budget for any president takes effect in October of the year he is sworn into office. Prior to that, he can ask for additional appropriations bills, but can't change the budget for the year he takes office, because it was started in October of the year before. Everyone knows this, and how often do you see that reflected in partisan charts?
This graph is fairly interesting, and set up by percentages of the total spent.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/ ... in-1-graph
It's fairly obvious from that what's growing, and apart from SS, which is different funding (as shown by any paycheck), it's medical backstops and the job programs + unemployment + disability.
So why does medical treatment in the US cost so much? If you look at this PDF, it's easily seen in the number of graduates.
https://www.aamc.org/download/153708/da ... to2012.pdf
Next question would obviously be, why we have not at least doubled the number of graduates in the last 30 years? That would certainly cut costs.
And buried deep within this article is a major reason why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/educa ... medus.html
Medical training in the United States has two components: medical school and residency, also known as graduate medical education. There are 130 accredited medical schools in the United States and 1,000 teaching hospitals to train residents. But the teaching hospitals are limited in the number of doctors they can train because
the large majority of residencies are paid for by Medicare, the federally funded health insurance for people over the age of 65, and these slots have been frozen since 1997.
And I suppose we all remember the major stink over this and the AMA demanding more residencies and more admissions? The appearances before congress sounding the alarms, etc.? (sound of crickets - - -) Nope, me neither. The AMA was very slow to say anything about this issue.
The shortage of medical practicioners in the USA is PLANNED and INTENDED to keep prices high. I have even seen statements from state medical boards saying limiting medical graduates is a necessity to keep prices up - and I'm sure they got the message to STFU from on high very quickly. This was in reference to no admissions at all to state supported dental schools in KY some years back, and they quite bluntly said they had a target number of dentists in the population that would not be exceeded as this would tend to drive down prices.
Our medical schools and training need to be brought up to date with the modern era. This isn't 1850, when a country doctor could take on an apprentice and train him in how to use leeches. Why can't the residency requirement be modified to reflect changing times? This wasn't brought down from heaven on stone tablets!
Cutting the unemployment program during a recession is about as popular as beating dogs. The extensions are set to expire next year, so that'll drop hard, unless that meeting in December changes things again.
The simplest means of cutting SS is to revoke the automatic COLA and let things work themselves out for a while. I remember when adjustments to SS payments had to be debated on the floor of Congress, and they were interesting debates too. Automatic COLA probably wasn't a good idea. Neither is having Congress set the payments. If it was left to the SSA, they'd simply adjust payments based on what comes in to keep it solvent to the end of whatever length of time Congress would mandate, which would be remarkably unpopular (given payouts would be slowly dropping now, if they set it for that 50 year solvency everyone gets all worked up about), but would work just fine.
Best site I know of for keeping track of election polls is Tanebaum's site,
http://www.electoral-vote.com
He has gotten pretty cynical about everyone lately, but his tracking is just on the polls, all the polls, and his site will do it with or without Fox News (Rasmussen) polls, your choice, depending on whether or not you think they are biased (they've come in over the last decade reliably with about 3% republican bias over the actual votes cast, so it's your call as to how much you trust Rasmussen after his performance this last decade - long article explaining this and what's going on there on the site).
I'm tired, server died this week and the engineer who was supposed to fix it didn't know how. It's trying leading someone by the hand when they are supposed to be the one telling you what to do, even though I had experience in this type of recovery and she didn't. Not one of my best weeks.
This will make a lot of people unhappy, Tabbi on the Romney years at Bain.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... l-20120829