Did you miss the 2011 Financial Report of the United States Government the Treasury Department released on December 23?  Bruce Bartlett did not.  At Economix, he pulls out some key facts from the report, and scares us a little bit with this graph:

Notice how much the projected future spending is not on government programs, but rather on interest owed against the federal debt.  And that spending is not, as Barlett notes, "just another government program that can be cut."  The way to cut that spending is by running a surplus.  Bartlett:

With interest rates at historical lows and the vast bulk of the debt in the form of short-term securities that roll over rapidly, the figures in the chart above are probably conservative. It is not hard to envision a situation in which interest on the debt rises more quickly than spending can be cut — a problem many European nations are in today.

It’s essential that we strive to overcome budgetary myopia. Our debts are manageable, but only if we take a long-run perspective.

Read The True Federal Debt here.