This is really getting maddening...

Everywhere you look there is talk about the consequences of the recently imposed automatic federal spending cuts. Although most of these are really cuts in the Washington sense of the word—a slower rate of spending increase—sequestration is designed to make deficit reduction choices on auto pilot when federal lawmakers are unable to make them in real life.

...

Ten years from now, automatically growing programs like Social Security and Medicare will make up 62 percent of annual spending. The Pentagon budget will be just 12 percent. We’re just seven years away from interest payments on the national debt outpacing defense.

According to an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, interest payments and entitlements will consume the entire federal budget by 2025. That means no funds left over for the programs hit by sequestration without substantial additional borrowing.

Wrong.  You're hopelessly optimistic.

This is today:

Note that tax receipts are approximately $2.7 trillion.

Social Security has expanded at a 6% rate over the last 30 years.  Medical spending has expanded at about a 9% rate over the last 30 years.  That's what those curves show.  There have been years that are more and some less, but that's the deal.

So let's project this forward, as I've done before, just two years.

Notice that both Social Security and Medicare now consume more than $1 trillion each.

If there is no ramp in intrest rates then interest will be about $250 billion.  This totals apprximately $2.4 trillion.

That leaves just $300 billion more in tax receipts.  Defense, the next-largest appropriation, is approximately $750 billion!

That's two years from now, not ten.

You cannot fix this with "entitlement" reform; that's a red herring and once again we see the ridiculous conflation of two separate issues -- one reasonably easy to solve, the other impossible within the realm of government spending as the problem doesn't lie there.  

Social Security, by and large, can be fixed -- you can index retirement to longevity and you can change the inflation escalator.  Those two things will neuter that part of the problem.  We can do that today.

Medical spending is another matter as it is not coming from Medicare and Medicaid but from the medical system as a whole and if it is not dealt with now it is going to become an intolerable problem in as little as two years.

I've written a whole host of articles on this point with the most-recent being here.

This isn't a subject of debate any longer.  It is now a matter of either solving the problem, here, now and today, or consigning ourselves to an imploding fiscal picture and rapidly-deteriorating general economy.

That's the deal.