Nate Silver Gets the Story Partly Right on Social Security and Medicare

In his new and improved FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver examines the sources of increases in government spending over recent decades and identifies Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as the culprits. He then notes that these are effectively insurance programs. He then concludes that this explains the decline in trust for government:

"Nevertheless, the declining level of trust in government since the 1970s is a fairly close mirror for the growth in spending on social insurance as a share of t...