from our friends at the Heritage Foundation

How much do entitlements cost?

How much taxpayer money does the government spend each year on entitlement programs?

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone cost $1.24 trillion (that’s $1,240,000,000,000) every year. And this number is spiraling upwards out of control.

Heritage Foundation experts have put this in perspective. They report that our spending on these three programs is equivalent to the entire Canadian economy—the 13th largest in the world.

They also produced a new “a la chart” graphic, which they sent to newspaper and magazine editors around the country to help get the word out about our runaway spending problem.

Unfortunately, liberals in Congress oppose attempts to curb even the growth of this massive spending.

Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl warns that “the coming entitlement spending tsunami is not going away. Every year of delay raises the eventual cost of reform by trillions of dollars. This is unconscionable. When the bill comes due, taxpayers will demand to know why Congress shirked their duty to confront this issue.”