Largely due to the aging of the US population, a commonly thrown around fact is that 60% of the budget goes toward entitlement spending.And if you decompose the budget, this is actually pretty accurate. The following visual is from the website Politifact and includes both mandatory and discretionary spending:The figure of 60% is actually pretty accurate. Over a quarter of the budget, or around $900 billion goes toward Social Security payments. Twenty-eight percent, or around $1 trillion, goes toward healthcare (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid), which is extraordinary. This means that US healthcare spending isn’t that far off from the entire GDP of Mexico, or half the GDP of India, which has a population of nearly 1.4 billion. The “Food Stamps” portion of the budget would be wrapped up into the “Food & Agriculture” category, which takes up 4% and includes other programs.With Social Security and healthcare taking up over half the budget – and growing – it’s unsurprising that so many politicians (almost always from the Republican side) have called for a partial privatization of many of these programs. Cumulatively they consume nearly $2 trillion, or two-thirds of what the US takes in in revenue per year. If spending cuts aren’t taken seriously in the Trump administration and the US is hitting deficits of 3%-4% of GDP each year, the national debt would be estimated to grow from $20 trillion to $25-$26 trillion in eight years’ time.