As we noted last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins has published an excellent analysis of the financial condition of the United States.

It's several hundred pages long, so we've been highlighting parts of it in shorter form.

Here's the big story...

If you listen to Republicans and Democrats (and even the Tea Party) bellyache about what's wrong with the US, you can be forgiven for thinking that the problem is that we spend too much on, say, Education. Or Defense.

Well, that's a crock.

We spend a LOT of Education and Defense, of course, but we arguably don't spend too much on these things, at least as a percentage of GDP. (We certainly spend too much on them relative to what we can afford).

What really busts our budget are the mind-boggling amounts we spend on our entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (especially Medicare and Medicaid). These programs are wildly more expensive than any other budget items, and they're also growing like weeds.

If we don't get Medicare and Medicaid expenses under control, the USA will go broke, pure and simple. And yet, almost no one in Washington has the stones to even talk about this, let alone do something about it. They just kick the can down the road.

What must we do to fix this problem?

Well, as Mary's charts show, there's almost no chance that we can "grow our way out of the problem."

To fix this problem, we must cut entitlement spending (or, at the very least, cut entitlement spending growth). Of course, cutting entitlement spending is taboo in Washington, which is why our wimpy "leaders" never talk about it.

Don't believe us? See for yourself. What's killing us is our entitlement programs. Everything else is fine.