Ben Shapiro: “This is not a cut to Medicaid. It is a cut to future Medicaid growth.”
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From the June 4, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So when we talk about President Trump not being a small spender, that's always been true. Again, he was a heterodox Republican politician. So I asked our friends and sponsors at Perplexity about this. How much did President Trump expand spending from 2017 to 2019? I didn't wanna count the pandemic. And then I asked, how much is the federal government slated to spend in 2025? What percentage of that spending is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and service on the debt? So to answer the first question, Trump era federal spending expansion from 2017 through 2019. According to Perplexity, when President Trump took office, the CBO projected deficits would be 2 to 3% of GDP during his term. The deficit instead reached nearly 4% of GDP in 2018 and 4.6% in 2019, driven largely by the 2017 tax cuts and increased discretionary spending. Over his four years, President Trump signed or enacted $7.8 trillion in new initiatives. By the way, only two trillion of that was actually attributable to the 2017 tax cuts, which means 5.8 trillion was everything else. This year, the federal government is slated to spend $7 trillion dollars. And how's that money being spent?
And this is the key. OK. If you actually wanna redo federal spending, you need to look at the entitlement programs. According to Perplexity, the 2025 outlays, Social Security, $1.4 trillion dollars. That is 20% of the federal budget. Medicare, $1 trillion dollars, another 14% of the federal budget. Medicaid and other health, $0.8 trillion dollars, $800 billion dollars. That's 11% of the federal budget. Net interest, almost a trillion dollars, 14% of the federal budget. Altogether, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on our debt, almost 60% of our federal budget. That is a wild, wild statistic. And this is why when people say, well, you can cut on the discretionary spending, cut on defense, that is not the major driver of our national debt. Until the American people get serious about that, ain't nothing gonna change.
And so this is why I say there is a difference between the ideologically accurate and the pragmatic.
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Right now, Republicans have a consensus to do a big thing with taxes, which is maintain the current tax rate, and they have the consensus to make some relatively small cuts with regard to the future of Medicaid growth. And, again, let's be clear about this. This is not a cut to Medicaid. It is a cut to future Medicaid growth. If that is what the support is there for, and if politics is the art of the possible, then what is President Trump supposed to do? He can't just magic this thing into existence. And this is one of the great lies about politics generally. Politicians will always tell you they can magic things into existence. No politician can. We have a system, for better or for worse -- in many cases, for better. When it comes to the inability of the American people to actually take debt seriously, certainly for worse, the short term thinking of the American people will end up biting us directly in the butt when it comes to the national debt.