“If we got rid of Medicaid, Medicare, and disassembled our welfare state, the government would be in good shape in pretty short order.”
I wish this were true... but if you look at the numbers, it is not. The national debt is now $14 trillion. In 2009, medicare and medicaid cost us $676 billion dollars. If the government somehow diverted all of this money to paying off the debt, it would take 20 years. These services are disproportionately used by the elderly, the blind, and the disabled. They also fund the majority of residencies (doctor training programs) in the US. Social Security is also around this size. And the department of defense is even larger. And even if the budgets of these services were cut, it would not fix the root of the problem. We simply spend too much and make to little. It would be a step in the right direction, though.