Explaining How to Cut Federal Spending - Americans Won't Like It

Where Did It Go? Major components of the $3.5 trillion spent in fiscal 2010
Social Security	20.4%
National Defense	20.1%
Medicare	13.1%
Medicaid/CHIP	8.1%
Interest	5.7%
Low-Income Assistance	5.3%
Unemployment Compensation	4.6%
Education & Training	3.7%
Federal Employee Retirement	3.5%
Veterans	3.1%
Transportation	2.7%
Other health care	2.6%
Parks & natural resources	1.3%
Space/Science	0.9%
Foreign aid	0.9%
Agriculture	0.6%
Everything else	3.5%

Which is Why Politicians Won't Tell Them

Ok, on the right is the menu.  President Obama
has set a target of reducing Federal spendng by
between $320 billion and $400 billion a year over the
next 10 years.

The waiter is waiting (that's what waiters do) and
the American public needs to choose what cuts
to order up to get to the number

Notice that the first five items plus federal retirement payments plus unemployment comp take up about 75% of the budget.  So that leaves 25% or about $900 billion to cut from if you do not want to touch any of the first five and fed retirement and unemployment comp.

This means to hit the target there is approximately a 35 -40% cut in all the other programs. 

All foreign aid?  That will get you about $35 billion at most, still  about $300 to $375 billion to go. 

All those Agriculture payments, that's even less than foreign aid.
                                                                                         Source

So here's what Mr. Obama and the Republican Deficit Cutters are selling everyone,

devastate social programs

or

 make major cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which will have signficant impact on retired individuals and low income/disabled/sick persons plus take billions out of the health care system which will have to be made up for by increasing health care charges.

The specifics, that's what everyone learns after the plan is implemented.