I gather, from what I’ve been reading and hearing in various places, that the right-wing line is that it’s all Solyndra — that your tax dollars are going to pay for vast numbers of wasteful projects.

Now, even the Solyndra story is a lot more nuanced than that. But this seems like a good time to repeat, once again, the truth about federal spending: Your federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. The vast bulk of its spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt.

But what about recent deficits? They’re caused mainly by a fall in revenue and a mostly automatic increase in spending on safety-net programs. Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.

The amounts spent on anything remotely resembling Solyndra is a rounding error on a rounding error. It’s just not what your government does on any significant scale.

And if you want smaller government, either you’re talking about cuts in the big five, or you have no idea what you’re talking about.