First the facts, then the debate in a format you've never seen before. Scott Galloway and Ben Shapiro face off with USA Facts founder Steve Ballmer presenting the data that frames each round, moderated by PBS NewsHour's Geoff Bennett, beginning now.
Welcome to the first Just the Facts debate hosted by USA Facts. I'm Steve Ballmer. I founded USA Facts to make sense of government data and present it to the American people. In this our first debate, before each round of questions, we'll be doing something completely different. The debate will take place there and I'll be here at the fact desk teeing up each topic with relevant government data and meaningful context without any partisan agenda. Even though our participants have different opinions and points of view, they have both agreed to a common set of underlying facts. Our goal: a debate anchored in facts on issues that matter to your life. Our theme: the American dream at 250 years. The debate moderator is Geoff Bennett, co-anchor and co-managing editor of the PBS NewsHour, an award-winning journalist who has covered six presidential elections and now the first ever USA debate. Take it away, Geoff.
Thank you, Steve. It is a real pleasure to be here and to moderate the first ever USA Facts debate. So, let's get right to it and introduce our debaters. Ben Shapiro is host of one of the world's most listened-to political podcasts, a best-selling author, and one of the most influential conservative voices of his generation. And Ben, you've also been known to enjoy a good argument from time to time on occasion. And Scott Galloway is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, podcast host, and professor of marketing at NYU, known for his provocative, data-driven takes on business, technology, and the economy. And Scott, you've just been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents. So, congratulations.
All right, gentlemen. Let's get right to it. Our topic: the American dream at 250. And of course, we start with the facts. So, back over to the fact desk.
Thanks, Geoff. The American dream at 250. First, whose dream? America's population is changing, and each of us has our own definition of the American dream. Let's start by looking at the share of population by age. Notice the one big change. The share of people 65 and older has grown dramatically from about 11% of the population in 1980 to just under 19% in 2025. And the makeup of households has changed. Since 1960, married parent households have declined from 44% of the total to just 17%. And single person households with no kids in them have risen from 13% to 29%. Our population is still growing each year, but less so. We still have more births than deaths, so-called natural population change, but fewer than we used to in the 2000s. And we have more new immigrants arriving per year on average. Finally, a big part of the American dream is the belief that every kid has the opportunity to move up, to be in the top income earners. What's actually going on? This slide looks at those born from 1978 to 1983 and divides them into groups based on their parents' income level. The methodology on this slide is complex, so I'll cut to the chase. For those whose parents were in the bottom 20% of income earners, 7% made it into the top in their 30s. If every kid had the same opportunity, this would be 20%. If their parents were in the middle 20%, 17% made it to the top. If they were born into the top 20%, 39% stayed there. The bottom line: our country is changing, and the American dream can mean different things to different people. Old and young, married and single, kids and adults, native-born people and immigrants. Let's hear what it means to Ben and Scott. Back to you, Geoff.
Thank you, Steve. So, first a quick word on the format for this opening and for each of the three questions that follow. You'll each have one minute for an initial response and then we'll open it up for a free-flowing exchange. So, those are the rules you both agreed to and I'll step in as needed to keep us to the format and make sure you each have a fair chance to make your case. So, Ben, first to you, one minute on the American dream at 250.
So I think that the first thing to understand about the American dream is that the American dream is not a set of outcomes. It is not a house or two kids or a picket fence. The American dream is a process. The idea is that if you engage in that process, you will be better off than your parents did. And then your kids will be better off than you were. And that process continues apace in the United States. The American dream is not that you are going to in one generation or in 10 years be able to go from poverty to tremendous wealth. It's again an incremental process. And the question is how well we are doing in allowing people to pursue those dreams and do so in accordance with good decision-making. There is supposed to be a correlation between the dutiful, virtuous decisions that we make, the hard work that we do and the outcomes of those decisions. Now that doesn't mean it's going to solve every problem for every person. That process doesn't solve problems for people who in some cases have been less privileged in their youth or people who face certain health obstacles or people who make bad decisions. And maybe in some of those circumstances, you do need government to step in and help people. But that really is a different question than the question of the American dream. And when we conflate those questions, we end up with bad policy undermining the relationship between cause and effect. That is the very basis for that fundamental American dream. Again, the idea that if you make good, responsible decisions, you will do better than your parents did, and your kids will do better than you did.
So, if you were to try to distill it down to one thing, I think the American dream is that you will do better than your parents, as you said. And I'll use myself as an example. Raised by a single immigrant mother, lived and died as a secretary. But I've got — I mean, the reality is America used to love the unremarkable. I got assisted lunch, Pell grants, applied to UCLA when it had a 74% admissions rate, now it has a 9% admissions rate. I came into the unbelievable economy of the '90s where because of the investments in technology by middle class families and things like GPS and DARPA, I got to start great internet companies. Immigrants built most of my companies. And all of those things, whether it's transfers, SNAP payments, Pell grants, the ability to attract the best and brightest from around the world to help you build those companies — all of those things are under attack. And for the first time in our history, a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his or her parents were at 30, which to me says that government policies, quite frankly, have eroded the American dream.
And that is one minute. So let's start here. According to the data that Steve presented, as you both noted, kids born poor rarely reach the top of the income ladder, while kids born rich mostly stay there. Ben, is that evidence of opportunity being hoarded or simply how mobility works in a market economy?
Well, I mean, to a certain extent, it's opportunity being hoarded, and to a large extent, it is just how things work in a market economy. Meaning that again, the goal isn't necessarily that you are going to be in the top tier if your parents were in the bottom tier. I don't know actually very many people for whom that is true. For my own family, if you have to go back four generations, when my great-great-grandparents got here at the early 20th century, they had nothing. They didn't speak English. And then their kids did better than they did. My parents did better than my grandparents. But we grew up, you know, very middle-lower middle class in Burbank, California. We had a great life, but it was a, you know, 1,100-foot small house, six people, four kids in essentially a one-bedroom, one-bathroom place. And you know, now, thank God, I do a lot better than my parents did. It is an intergenerational process. And I think the impatience that has now become part of the way that we see how the American dream should work — that you should be able to go from poverty to great wealth in one generation, and if that's not happening, then the system has somehow failed — I think that there are some outsized expectations. That doesn't mean the system is working ideally or that we can't remove obstacles to success. The question I think that we're going to be arguing a lot about today is exactly what the obstacles are and how do we remove them. Are those obstacles being provided by markets, by private actors, or are those obstacles being created by perverse government incentives that actually are creating obstacles, creating systemic barriers to that relationship between cause and effect?
Scott, how do you see it?
Well, the data that you distributed, it looks like about 37% of people in the upper quintile stay there and only about 7.4% in the lowest quintile manage to get forward. Now, there's some argument about whether that's gone down or whether it's flat, but when you have registered the type of prosperity that America has registered over the last four decades, you'd like to think that income mobility has gone up. And while we like to think we're a meritocracy, the data says something different. And that is, if the race to economic security is a marathon, the smartest thing you can do is be born to rich parents. There's just some people starting the marathon at the 20-mile mark. And we do have affirmative action that lifts up people, but the people we decide deserve affirmative action are people who were born a really long time ago. We'll talk a lot about transfer payments, but the biggest increase in transfer payments, quite frankly, and the core of the problem here is that we have decided to transfer opportunity and capital from the entrants to the incumbents, from the young to the old. And we have weaponized government. It's not about, in my opinion, taxation. It is about the misallocation of those taxes.
Scott and Ben, thanks to you both. That's a lot to dive into. So, let's turn now to the first question. Is government or capitalism better serving the American dream? First, over to the fact desk for a quick briefing.
Thanks, Geoff. This is a big topic. Before diving in, I have a quick sidebar on how we make sense of Americans' financial situations. Ultimately, we need to look at what families have available to spend — their disposable income — and that includes their income and also what government provides in assistance and takes away in taxes. We're going to talk a lot about families, which includes people who live alone. We're going to group these families by income: the top 1% in income, the next 19%, and then the rest of families into groups of 20% by income. And we separate the elderly into their own category. So for example, the middle 20% of families have an income range of $45,000 to $87,000 and an average income of $65,000. The elderly, just over $88,000 in market income on average. This slide tells us a lot about today's American dream. Let me break it down. The data compares the year 2000 to 2023. That's the most recent year we have complete data. The numbers are all adjusted for inflation. The first column shows the groups. Next is market income. That includes wages, business income, investment income, and retirement income, and includes earnings from everyone in the family. Market income increased for the top 40% of families, was relatively stagnant for the middle 20% — you can think of that, if you will, as the middle class — and declined for the bottom 40%, especially the lowest-earning families. For families where the head of household is 65 years or older, income increased slightly. Next, let's look at government transfers. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs, nutrition, housing, and income assistance. Income assistance includes things like the Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance and all the other government benefits. Those government transfers per family increased across every group in dollar amounts. They had the biggest impact on the lowest earners, and the elderly received the most in total. The next column shows changes in how much families pay in federal income tax, payroll tax, and state and local taxes. The higher earners are paying more than they were in 2000. The lower earners are paying less. Finally, the last column: disposable income. Here's the key takeaway. Every group ends up with higher disposable income in 2023, and government transfers and changing tax burdens play a key role in their financial picture. Now, let's look at wages. This chart shows wages by low, median, and high-paying jobs for someone working full-time over a full year. Lower-wage jobs saw the largest gain, with wages increasing 15% from 2001 to 2025. Again, adjusted for inflation. The median-wage jobs and highest-wage jobs saw 4% and 5% increases. Now, let's look at taxes. This compares the share of income earned to the share of federal income taxes paid by different groups. The top 1% earns 21% of all income and pays 38% of taxes. And if you add them up, the 20% of highest earners earn 63% of income and pay 83% of taxes. The lowest 50% earns 12% of total income and pays 3% of taxes. Now remember, this is just federal income taxes in this case. It does not include state and local taxes or any payroll taxes. That's a quick economic overview. Plenty to debate. Geoff.
Thank you, Steve. Okay, Scott, you're up first this time. One minute. Is government or capitalism better serving the American dream?
I think they both work, but unfortunately I think they've been captured by the incumbents. Over the last 40 years, we've increased payments to people over the age of 65 by about $400 to $600 billion a year. And we've increased payments or transfers to children by 20 billion. We're now spending more money on ICE than we're spending on children. So if your budget is a value system, do we really — is our values that we're more worried about the undocumented worker at a car wash or taking care of your mom than we are about creating a permanent underclass? And I would push back on some of the data that Stephen was reading about the 1% pay 52% of the taxes in New York. We hear that a lot. But here's the reality. The problem is with the word 'paid' taxes. Five of the last seven years I've paid no taxes because this is what rich people do. They invest in stocks and assets that go tax-deferred and they never recognize a capital event. They borrow against those assets. They put them in a trust where they're marked up. So yeah, when taxes are paid, the wealthy pay a lot. But the reality is a lot of the wealthy are paying no taxes.
And that is one minute. Ben, your response.
I mean, I'll start with the idea that government and capitalism ought not be in conflict. The basic idea of capitalism is simply that you have private property rights. That you should be able to freely trade, alienate, rent. That is all private property and free markets mean. And we are all best served when we actually have those rights. Government is designed to protect those rights. I mean, this is the founding promise. Now obviously government can do other things. Government can provide for those who fall between the cracks I was discussing earlier. The problem becomes when government gets into the business of distorting free markets so badly that you end up with the worst of both worlds. And I think that in some areas of American life — housing, I say college education — you've ended up with in some cases the worst of both worlds where a sort of cronyistic structure has emerged and that cronyistic structure has actually exacerbated many of the problems that we see with, for example, affordability. As far as the tax burden, I mean, it is true obviously that people who are wealthy can, you know, withhold their gains until time is to cash in. It's also true that a lot of that money, you know, for me, I'll take that — that was earned money that I then invested. So, I paid an income tax on it and then I invested it and until I withdraw that money, I won't pay taxes on it, but I did pay tax on it one time. And I can promise you that the amount of tax that I'm paying this year is a hell of a lot higher than when I was earning a lot less money.
So Scott, what does Ben get wrong when he says the answer is more economic freedom, more personal responsibility, not necessarily more government?
So I think where there's some common ground around where we probably look — spending $7 trillion on $5 trillion in receipts is nothing but deferred taxes on the young, the deficit. Do we need to raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. And it's time for a responsible conversation. The way I think of it is there's a metaphor. Capitalism when it works is a horse, a thoroughbred that you want to run, that's amazing, most impressive animal ever invented, that leverages self-interest. Government is the jockey or the rider. The far left wants to shoot the horse. And the far right thinks that horses can read maps on their own and that the middle class is some self-occurring organism. The middle class, which is the greatest innovation in history — it's not GPS, it's not vaccines, it's the American middle class. But it requires — the myth on the right is that it's a self-occurring organism — it requires constant reinvestment. Otherwise, we turn back to the way most of history has been for most countries, and that is a small group of very talented or very fortunate people weaponize government and create regulatory capture. And we're seeing it in the US now. The tax code has gone from 400 pages to 4,000. And those incremental 3,600 pages are there to screw the middle class. You now have essentially a tax system which is — if you can navigate by starlight and afford people to navigate the complex tax code, you want to run your races at night. The lower middle class are paying their fair share. The highest income earners have such complicated taxes that they in fact take advantage of the greatest tax cut in history, and that is the neutering of the IRS, and no longer have the resources to collect what is a $750 billion a year tax gap. So what is the government? The government has become essentially an agency for the transfer of wealth from the young to the old, and I would argue from the lower and middle class households to the wealthy.
I want to drill down on one point you made: this idea that the middle class is not a self-occurring phenomenon, that it requires tending, it requires maintenance by the government. To which you would say what?
I would say that that is an area of significant disagreement. I do not think that the middle class has to be upheld by an artificial barrier or artificial regulatory structure created by the government. Many of the things that Scott is characterizing as weaponizations of government I would characterize as inherent to the bureaucratic process of government. Once government grows large enough, once you have a giant grab bag of control and cash, then it just becomes a question of who controls the dials and who controls the cash. And so part of the problem with growth of government inherently is that there will be a competition to then rewrite all the rules on behalf of a few. And that's not something that I would consider free market in the first place. I would blame the jockey, not blame the horse in your metaphor for that particular problem. When you talk about the fair share that's being paid, the truth is that in terms of net taxes, meaning taxes net of benefits, the people who are at the lower end of the income spectrum, because of the vast amount of redistribution in our system, are drawing far more from the system than they're paying in taxes. And the people at the top end of the system are paying far more in taxes than they're drawing from the system. Now, you can argue there are indirect subsidies in the form of government interventions via DARPA, for example, and these sorts of things. But the reality is that government has existed for all of human history. The freedom of free markets to allow for innovation has existed for approximately 220 years or so. And virtually all growth in wealth and innovation over the course of human history happened in that time. So it is innovation in free markets that is the difference, not government and bureaucracy, which have existed for literally all the time going back to, you know, the prehistoric era essentially.
Well, that government and bureaucracy is the reason that innovation works. The greatest lift of middle class citizens in history has happened in China over the last 40 or 50 years. And I think that's largely been because of their massive investments in infrastructure, in technology, whether it's renewables, and a respect for the middle class that results in a basis of infrastructure and economic growth. What I would put back to you, Ben, is: can you name a society that has a really robust middle class where the government hasn't gone out of its way to make long-term investments in infrastructure and education and healthcare and engage in some form of redistribution that has a healthy middle class?
I'm not making the argument that the government should never be involved in things like infrastructure, education. I am arguing that the vast bureaucracy that you see in China has actually been an inhibiting factor on their growth. But the bureaucracy preceded the attempt to liberalize China, which happened in the 1980s and '90s. That existed under Mao. Mao was not short on bureaucracy. Mao had plenty of bureaucracy. He was very short on free markets. It was the addition of a free market element to China that allowed for their growth. And in fact, if you look back at Chinese history, it was the growth of Chinese bureaucracy over the course of centuries that actually stagnated China, because China actually was a world power about 1,500 years ago, and then for a while they were not a world power, and now of course they have risen to world power again. So again, I think that conflating all government action together when it comes to the middle class, you know, conflating the duty to educate children with, for example, a gigantic government healthcare structure that is based on subsidies and regulations — that is what makes it so expensive. I don't think all forms of government intervention are equivalent. In other words,
But just to respond to one thing: you're saying bureaucracy and you use the word healthcare. Isn't it the real problem that we have monetized healthcare and prioritized shareholders and given companies an economic incentive to reject claims? And that in the World Cup, if you're a football fan, we were the only country that didn't have socialized healthcare. If you look at the rest of the G7, they spend $13,500 per capita on healthcare. We spend $13,500 — no, we spend $6,500 for worse outcomes. And we have, quote-unquote, the most capitalist healthcare system. I would argue that if you look at the three buckets of the economy — the earner, the consumer, and the shareholder — we have decided purposely through legislation and regulatory capture to transfer capital and opportunity from earners and from consumers to shareholders. And I think healthcare is a great example of that.
I think that when it comes to healthcare, we have basically two processes that are trying to run in tandem that actually tend to run away from one another. One is innovation and one is universality. And I'm not sure that those two things tend to run comfortably together. And when we try to use a government process to do both of those things, you end up having to pick. And basically the United States has picked medical innovation, where we are in fact a dominant world power. And we have traded away, for example, the affordability of healthcare. And so the reality is that we subsidize the rest of the world when it comes to their healthcare. I mean, all of the innovations, all of the medicines that are being used by those nationalized healthcare systems or universal healthcare systems are developed by the United States. And then we really ought to force those countries — if you want to talk about fair share, they ought to be paying their fair share of the innovative cost to us. We allow them to basically hold up the American taxpayer and the American consumer because we're subsidizing the innovation and then they are reaping all the benefits abroad.
On the specific matter of capitalism versus government, Scott, what does government do better than the private sector and what does the market do better than the government?
I think that you need government to create an operating system, a rule of fair play. I think you need to have a certain level of taxation. You have to regulate externalities. One of the biggest, I think, problems in our society the last 20 or 30 years is that — I think fossil fuels are net positive for the world. Pesticides are positive for the world. But we have an EPA and an FDA because we realize there's externalities, and if we don't demand and put in place laws that prevent Ford from pouring mercury into the river, GM and Stellantis will, because they would be at an economic disadvantage if they don't. Our biggest sector by growth and by increasing shareholder value is largely unregulated now, and that's big tech. So as an example of what government needs to do: it needs to protect people's civil rights. It needs to protect our borders, fund a military. I also think it needs to address externalities of capitalism when it runs amok and begins monetizing healthcare, begins monetizing and privatizing prisons, begins monetizing now even the White House. So unless there's a rule of fair play and a feel that you are going to have the same shot as everybody else, and there are certain rules and certain things that recognize at some point when you let companies run totally unfettered and have no government intervention around laws or regulation, you end up with pesticides, cancers, 15-year-olds garnering the majority of self-harm, and quite frankly a wild west where a few people garner the majority of the gains. So I think government plays a huge role in a successful society.
I mean, obviously I agree with a lot of what Scott is saying in terms of the government's role in collective action problems and regulating externalities and all the rest of that. I think that we would hardly disagree on the extent to which government is necessary to do many of those things. I mean, for example, tort law exists for many of these externalities that we're talking about, and tort law goes back several centuries. So, the idea that you need certain people who are regulatory experts at the EPA using laws that were not written — like the Clean Air Act — in order to regulate carbon emissions, if we want to do that, this is why we have a democratic process. This is not why we have regulatory agencies that are supposed to be interpreting laws that were already written. And so, you know, trying to decide all of this, it seems to me that most of it is better solved by the widely dispersed knowledge of the American people rather than a centralized cadre of experts or elected leaders to actually do that. And I think one of the problems that we see very often is huge market distortions that are secondary effects of well-meaning but wrong-headed government interventions. I mean, the education system is a perfect example of this, where you see the government gets deeply involved in education, and in some areas what that means is that they believe that if they just pour money into education that will fix all the problems. That obviously has not fixed all of the problems in a wide variety of areas. I went to the LAUSD school system, which was actually quite heavily funded. It's not a great school system. It had some pretty serious problems, and pouring more money into that didn't actually solve the problems. And the same thing is true on the college level. There was a sort of mistake that was made at the college level where people looked at the correlation between people going to college and earning more and said, you know what, it would be great if everyone went to college. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that Pell grants are available to everyone, no matter your major, no matter the college you go to, and we will create outsized demand for college degrees, many of which are actually bad bets for the student. That to me would have been better solved by private markets, which would have stopped the credentialing in colleges, because you don't need a college degree to be a barista. You don't need a college degree for half the jobs that now require a college degree. In other words, when it comes to government, I think we have to be very careful about how we use government, because government is a thing that we control. I don't think the economy is a thing that we generally control. I think the government is a thing that we control. And trying to figure out exactly where we intervene and where we don't is the question, and people tend to think that the government's a scalpel when it's actually a hammer.
Some of the data that Steve presented earlier spoke to this issue of generational change in this country. And as the country gets older, how should we balance protecting the wealth that older Americans have accumulated with creating opportunity for the generations that come behind them? Scott, I'll start with you.
The greatest intergenerational theft in history is taking place slowly but surely over the last 30 or 40 years. It used to be, I believe, 34% of our payments were automatic. Now it's over 50%, and the majority of that goes to seniors. Payments to seniors now account for 40% of the federal budget. It'll soon be 50%, crowding out investments in technology and education, which would show a greater return on investment. If you think about it, the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet is seniors, and yet every year we effect the largest transfer in history, and that is $1.5 trillion from young people to the wealthiest generation in history. The democratic process is working too well, and that is the bottom line: older voters keep voting even older people into office who vote themselves more money. And so while it's been a successful program, 10 to 20% of Social Security recipients state that they don't need the money, so that would save us $150 to $300 billion right there. And just this notion, a little bit around education about bureaucracy being the boogeyman — I believe we need standards and certain public schools to be shut down. But here's the actual data. Public schools spend on average in America $15,000 per student, $10,000 in low-income neighborhoods. The schools where our kids go, private schools spend on average $75,000 a year on that kid. So, the child of a rich person who's able to send his kid to private school ends up spending about another three-quarters of a million dollars on that kid through the 12 years of an educational system. The result is SAT scores are 130 points different between low-income and middle-income households, and then 250 points difference between middle and upper income. My fear is that this term 'bureaucracy' and that it's not working has created an environment where rich people are sequestering from anything that gives them a vested interest in America. We have our own transportation, our own security, our own police forces, our own schools, our own healthcare. So why would wealthy people have a vested interest in the well-being of America? And instead they just go to these big words like bureaucracy and inefficiency, recognizing that whatever we're doing is not working, and the private markets don't tend at some point to figure much of this out. It requires government intervention, and I'll use the r-word: redistribution of income.
Ben, you have the final word in this portion of our debate.
Obviously, when it comes to intervention and redistribution of income, I think that we have to be careful again about using a blunderbuss where at best an eyedropper would do. I think that when it comes to things like education, obviously my home state of Florida has engaged in essentially a universal school voucher program, which means that people now have the ability to take their kids from public school and put them in a better private school. And that has actually led to competition and the opening of a vast variety of new schools in the state of Florida. Again, an area where the market is actually doing a good job in coordination with some government redistributionism. I think that how you use this stuff needs to be extremely specific. And I think the biggest mistake that people make about government is believing that if you just fire-hose cash at things that it's going to generally solve the problem. And that, by the way, is the problem with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is that we fire-hose cash at people as they age. And then it turns out people like having cash fire-hosed at them, and then they will continue to vote for that. And even if you poll people who are 50, they will continue to vote for Social Security kicking in at 65 because again, generations are not actually hard and fast rules. Somebody who's 50 presumably will end up being 65 and will also now be on the beneficiary end of that particular game.
All right, so let's put a pin in this for now. On to our next question. In the context of the American dream, is the government doing too much or too little? Over to Steve now for some facts.
Thanks, Geoff. Round two. Let's dive into federal government transfers. Here we see the percentage of individuals who receive assistance from key programs and how that has changed since 2013. Social Security and Medicare reach the largest percentage of the population, around 20%, and have increased as the population has grown older. About 20% of individuals receive Medicaid, up slightly, and about 11% receive food stamps, down from 2013. Let's look at families who receive these benefits by income and age. Over half of the spending on these programs goes to seniors, most of whom receive Social Security and Medicare. The other half of the spending on these programs is targeted more towards lower-earning families through programs like Medicaid, refundable tax credits, and food stamps. Although, as you can see, some is also distributed to higher earners. Here you can see the growth since 1980 of mandatory assistance programs such as Medicare, health assistance — including federal Medicaid contributions and Affordable Care Act subsidies — and Social Security. Those renew automatically without congressional approval. Combined, these programs grew from just over 35% of total federal spending in 1980 to over 54% today. With these mandatory increases, as well as increases in other government spending in areas like defense, you can see that the deficit has grown from $295 billion in 1980 to $1.78 trillion in 2025, adjusted for inflation. This is important context as we look at government transfers at over 50% of total federal spend. That is sure worth an energetic debate. Geoff.
