As the graph above illustrates, mandatory spending has grown substantially over time, from about 27 percent of the budget (including interest payments) in 1965, to a projected 62 percent of the budget in 2023. This reflects a combination of policy choices: expanding the offerings of the programs (such as President Bush’s signing of the Medicare prescription drug plan or President Obama’s increase in income eligibility of Medicaid), creating totally new programs (as with Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges) as well as the growth of the aging population and rising health care costs.

After experiencing a spike from the economic stimulus package, discretionary spending is expected to decline slightly over the next two years and than grow at a slower rate than previously projected thereafter. Under current projections, which assume all of the cuts enacted by the 2011 debt ceiling agreement go into effect, discretionary spending will be 11 percent higher in 2023 than it was in 2012. However, mandatory spending barely got touched in the budget agreement (only about 10 percent of the cuts were to mandatory spending). So, between 2012 and 2023, mandatory spending is projected to grow by a staggering 80 percent.