“Government spending may also go up automatically when farmers produce such a bumper crop that it cannot all be sold at the prices guaranteed under agricultural subsidy laws, and so the government is legally obligated to buy the surplus. Unemployment compensation and agricultural subsidies are just two of a whole spectrum of “entitlement” programs whose spending is beyond the control of any given administration, once these programs have been enacted into law. Only repeal of existing entitlement legislation can stop the spending—and that means offending all the existing beneficiaries of such legislation, who may be more numerous than those whose support made that legislation possible in the first place. In short, although government spending and the annual deficits and accumulated national debts which often result from that spending are often blamed on those officials who happen to be in charge of the government at a given time, much of the spending is not at their discretion but is mandated by pre-existing laws. In the U.S. budget for fiscal year 2008, for example, even the military budget for a country currently at war was exceeded by non-discretionary spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.{”
— Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell