Thread · HN Continuity

If you cross your eyes and squint a little bit, the following categories of 2026 spending are around the same size:

    $ 1   T    : total defense (roughly)
    $ 1.7 T    : total social security
    $ 1.1 T    : total medicare
    $ 0.7 T    : total medicaid
    $ 0.7 T    : total other entitlements (SNAP, VA, etc)
    $ 1.1 T    : net interest on the debt
    $ 1.0 T    : all other discretionary spending

The US took in somewhere around $5.6T in revenue in 2026. That's a net deficit of just under $2 T. Or roughly double the average size of the "block" of those separate spending categories. These are abased on Feb 2026 CBO assumptions. Net interest is going to keep rising as the Treasury yield rises.

So ... we can't fix this by doing any one thing. Even if we were willing to completely end social security (while keeping the separate contribution tax), that wouldn't be enough. If we threw away our military entirely, we would only be half way there.

We need to do everything a little bit, all at once.

Raise taxes - corporate and personal, on every bracket, progressively more on the rich ... but this will not even be half of enough because of the strength of the debt bomb and the global flexibility of corporations.

Cut defense spending - but not too much, because we also need to provide funding to repair alliances, rebuild our ancient navy, and rebuild our standoff and interceptor stockpiles after the recent middle east adventurism.

Repair social security - cut benefits, add a means test, raise the contribution amount and limits ... lots of things to do here.

Fix health care - it's just too damn expensive across the board; the US pays for this in the VA, medicare, medicaid, and the poor health of its workforce. I have no idea where to start on this one.

The CBO has a ton of data on this kind of thing. I like their budget options page for exploring the forecasts for specific changes. Of course it's not as simple as adding the numbers together to get to the deficit, but it's a good place to learn more and ground some assumptions.

<a href="https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options

I got some of these numbers from:

<a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105

I used Claude to research this, but I wrote the post myself.