It says nothing about roughly three-quarters of over-all federal spending, which goes to mandatory outlays such as Social Security, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt.
Since 2000, both the annual "mandatory" outlays, which include most of the social spending, and the annual "discretionary" outlays which include defense, have roughly doubled.
I used CBO's reported 0utlay figure (from 1. Revenues, Outlays, Deficits, Surpluses, and Debt Held by the Public Since 1968) and subtracted total Social Security and Medicare spending (from 5. Mandatory Outlays Since 1968) since these are largely financed by trust fund revenues.
But in the latter years of this period, "rising spending on those health care and entitlement programs will cause mandatory outlays to increase again at a faster rate than the economy". That is, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will continue racing upward, threatening to swamp the rest of spending.
The office wrote that "discretionary outlays will drop by $35 billion and mandatory spending will be reduced by $9 billion this year as a direct result of those procedures; additional reductions in outlays attributable to the cuts in 2013 funding will occur in later years".
Already, mandatory spending, at $1 trillion, greatly exceeds domestic discretionary outlays at $326 billion this year.
Worse, after interest payments and the fulfillment of mandatory spending obligations, in Toomey's brave new world the federal government would only have about $330 billion to meet its projected $1.4 trillion in outlays for discretionary spending.
In addition, since 1962, OMB recorded mandatory and discretionary outlays for each federal program.
Discretionary annual outlays climbed from $614.6 billion in 2000 to $1.28 trillion in 2012 and mandatory annual spending jumped from just over $1 trillion in 2000 to more than $2 trillion in 2012.
And he wasn't even responsible for most of the increase in federal spending that happened on his watch: it came in the form of higher outlays for mandatory programs, such as Social Security, other entitlements, and interest on the national debt.
Government outlays for health care seem to be mandatory, even though individuals abuse their health at the public's expense.
