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As long as we’re passing out facts today, here are some more. This chart shows federal spending over the past few decades as a percentage of GDP:

All numbers are from the OMB. The trend lines are pretty simple:

  1. Domestic discretionary spending and miscellaneous mandatory spending (“Other”) is on a steady downward slope.
  2. Interest spending is on a downward slope.
  3. Defense spending has gone up over the past decade due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but otherwise is on a steady downward slope.
  4. Social Security is pretty flat.
  5. Medicare spending is up.

I cut this chart off at 2008 so that the long-term trends are easier to see. There’s been a spike in these numbers over the past three years because the recession has temporarily depressed GDP and temporarily increased spending — just as there were spikes during the recessions of 1979, 1989, and 2001 — but that spike will go away when the economy improves. There’s no special reason that it should affect our view of our long-term finances.

So: should we be especially worried about discretionary spending, defense spending, or interest expenses? No. They haven’t gone up over the past 30+ years and there’s no special reason to think that trend will change. As always, we should pay attention to which programs we need and how to make them more efficient, but these parts of the budget just aren’t long-term problems.

Should we be worried about Social Security? Not really. It will go up in the future thanks to the retirement of the baby boomers, but we know exactly how much it’s going to increase: 1-2% of GDP through 2030 or so, and then it flattens out forever. That’s going to require some combination of very small tax increases and very small benefit cuts over the next two decades, and that’s it. No surprises.

This leaves Medicare. And that we should be worried about. It’s gone steadily up over the past three decades and every forecast suggests it will keep going up indefinitely. Ditto for every other kind of healthcare spending, both federal and private.

Bottom line: our current deficit panic is mostly just manufactured hysteria. Our recent spike in spending is an artifact of the recession and will go away in the next few years. Generally speaking, defense, discretionary, and interest expenses aren’t an issue and don’t really need any special attention. Social Security is basically fine and needs only a few small tweaks. The only thing we should be seriously concerned about is healthcare spending. Period. That’s the whole story. Anything else is just partisan showmanship.

Those are the facts. Pass ’em along.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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