Why approach it from the "cutting down Medicaid and Medicare" angle when it's not the health insurance, but the actual delivery of healthcare that's driving up spending? Medicare/Medicaid are exceptionally efficient programs that pay less to doctors than private insurance due to their massive purchasing power. There's very little fat in their budgets, so cutting the programs means cutting benefits. There are many other areas of the budget where we can look for inefficiency -- why focus on one of the few things the federal government does right?


Getting the second derivative moving in the right direction doesn't change the fact that the funding levels are too high. Why should the defense budget be growing at all now that we're winding down (or trying to wind down) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? We threw both of those wars on the credit card, and now it's time to *shrink* the defense budget, not simply reduce the rate of growth. Saying we just need to reduce the rate of growth from the astronomical levels of growth we had during the last decade is moving the goalposts a bit too far -- and I say that as someone who gets a majority of his project funding from defense and national security budgets.