Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

This graph from the New York Times demonstrating federal financial priorities is a little bit hard to read because some of the trend lines are just so thin, but it makes its point anyway:

Treasury may be the exception to this (though given that the IRS is a service-based, transactional organization no matter how little we like those services), but really, federal spending is concentrated highly in bureaucracies no one is likely to want to give up. This is why cutting federal spending is so hard. You can make the skinniest trend lines even more invisible, and have next to no impact on the overall financial picture. (H/T: Ezra Klein)