CBO Report on Long-Term Spending on Entitlement Programs

From the report:

In fiscal year 2007, spending by the federal government will amount to $2.7 trillion, or one-fifth of the nation’s economic output, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects. The three major federal entitlement programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- will account for about 45 percent of those outlays, or about 9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). If policymakers leave current laws unchanged, federal outlays will claim a sharply increasing share of the nation’s output over coming decades, driven primarily by growth in the health-related entitlement programs.