MTV Fake-Hacks Its Own Twitter Handle, Proving That MTV Is Still Terrible

On Tuesday afternoon, just as the week of the big-brand Twitter hack was getting as old as it was useful to the “victims,” the Twitter feeds of BET and MTV — both owned by the media conglomerate Viacom — were “hacked.” Except they weren’t, in fact, hacked. They were stunt-hacked in a pre-planned, inter-office joke that turned into a viral marketing ploy gone bad.

RELATED: 4 Reasons To Praise Twitter’s New URL Shortener

On Monday hackers took to Burger King’s Twitter feed in a fake McDonald’s takeover that gained the brand 30,000 followers and a whole lot of social-media brand recognition, almost by accident. By midday Tuesday, Jeep had been “taken over” by hackers posing as Cadillac, and thousands of followers came with the very similar “attack.” But the social-media teams at BET and MTV had already noticed the bump, and had some “fun” in store. Which, because this is Twitter and jokes last about a day, didn’t end up much fun for anyone involved — and because this is MTV, definitely ended up in making the network look even more behind the times than usual.

RELATED: Does Google Have a Double Agent at Twitter?

We spotted this message (since deleted) from BET’s “social media pugilist”:

RELATED: The New York Times’s Bill Keller Riles Up Twitter

And there was this evidence, from an MTV marketing director’s feed minutes before the reality-TV channel was hacked:

MTV Marketing Director @schoprah tweets about the #MTVhack 4 minutes before the first “hacked” @mtv post:twitpic.com/c563h6

— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) February 19, 2013

And have at these musings that MTV’s social media manger, Tom Fischman, tweeted after Burger King was hacked yesterday:

Is there any real downside to the @burgerking hack? Mistake leaving the account suspended all day, would have seen a nice follower windfall.

— Thomas Fishman (@Tom_Fishman) February 18, 2013

@mcbc Nobody thinks BK tweeted that stuff, doesn’t really reflect on them at all. Just bought them a ton of publicity, sympathy if anything.

— Thomas Fishman (@Tom_Fishman) February 18, 2013

The stunt certainly earned MTV and BET a bunch of publicity — like this post that you’re reading! — but came with the price of Twitter’s scorn … and no real bump in followers to either feed, either up or down:

I knew MTV wasn’t hacked when their content continued to still be complete crap.

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) February 19, 2013

I hope @twitter suspends @mtv and @bet just for being asshats

— Peter Ha (@ThePeterHa) February 19, 2013

It’s days like today that make me hate the Internet.

— Jared Keller (@jaredbkeller) February 19, 2013

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How Does Fergie's Maternity Style Stack Up to Kate, Jessica and Kim?

Stylewatch
Style News Now

02/19/2013 at 03:31 PM ET

Getty; GSI; Abaca; Xposure

When we heard that Fergie was expecting a baby Black Eyed Pea, we were on the edge of our seats waiting to see how the famously funky star‘s maternity style would play out. Luckily she didn’t keep us waiting long, stepping out with husband Josh Duhamel Tuesday in a shearling bomber jacket, yellow sweater dress and circular sunglasses.

“It’s clear to see how happy they are,” a source close to the couple tells PEOPLE. ”They are really excited.” And we are really excited to see how her outfits fit into the range of maternity style — from low-key to high-wattage — that we’ve been spotting from L.A. to London.

On the “mild” end of the spectrum is the Duchess of Cambridge (left), who has dressed her barely-there bump in conservative coats and this elegant Max Mara wrap dress.

A little wilder is Jessica Simpson, wearing a pink jacket with Jessica Simpson Maternity leggings, who sticks to the same styles she favors even when not pregnant (blazers, maxis and sky-high heels) but isn’t shy about putting her fuller curves on display with plunging V-necks.

And on the far end of the “mild to wild”-o-meter: Kim Kardashian, of course, who has put her bump on display in feathers, crop tops, mesh, sequins and sheer numbers — including this onesie pantsuit.

As it turns out, these stars’ maternity style isn’t so different from how they dressed pre-baby … which makes us even more excited to see how the rest of their pregnancy wardrobe will go. Tell us: Who’s the best-dressed mom-to-be?

–Alex Apatoff

PHOTOS: SEE MORE STAR MATERNITY STYLE HERE!

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Hip implants a bit more likely to fail in women

CHICAGO (AP) — Hip replacements are slightly more likely to fail in women than in men, according to one of the largest studies of its kind in U.S. patients. The risk of the implants failing is low, but women were 29 percent more likely than men to need a repeat surgery within the first three years.

The message for women considering hip replacement surgery remains unclear. It's not known which models of hip implants perform best in women, even though women make up the majority of the more than 400,000 Americans who have full or partial hip replacements each year to ease the pain and loss of mobility caused by arthritis or injuries.

"This is the first step in what has to be a much longer-term research strategy to figure out why women have worse experiences," said Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Research Center for Women & Families. "Research in this area could save billions of dollars" and prevent patients from experiencing the pain and inconvenience of surgeries to fix hip implants that go wrong.

Researchers looked at more than 35,000 surgeries at 46 hospitals in the Kaiser Permanente health system. The research, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, was funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

After an average of three years, 2.3 percent of the women and 1.9 percent of the men had undergone revision surgery to fix a problem with the original hip replacement. Problems included instability, infection, broken bones and loosening.

"There is an increased risk of failure in women compared to men," said lead author Maria Inacio, an epidemiologist at Southern California Permanente Medical Group in San Diego. "This is still a very small number of failures."

Women tend to have smaller joints and bones than men, and so they tend to need smaller artificial hips. Devices with smaller femoral heads — the ball-shaped part of the ball-and-socket joint in an artificial hip — are more likely to dislocate and require a surgical repair.

That explained some, but not all, of the difference between women and men in the study. It's not clear what else may have contributed to the gap. Co-author Dr. Monti Khatod, an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles, speculated that one factor may be a greater loss of bone density in women.

The failure of metal-on-metal hips was almost twice as high for women than in men. The once-popular models were promoted by manufacturers as being more durable than standard plastic or ceramic joints, but several high-profile recalls have led to a decrease in their use in recent years.

"Don't be fooled by hype about a new hip product," said Zuckerman, who wrote an accompanying commentary in the medical journal. "I would not choose the latest, greatest hip implant if I were a woman patient. ... At least if it's been for sale for a few years, there's more evidence for how well it's working."

___

Online:

Journal: http://www.jamainternalmed.com

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Yen resumes fall after G20, U.S. holiday thins trade

LONDON (Reuters) - The yen resumed falling on Monday after Japan signaled it would push ahead with expansionist monetary policies having escaped criticism from the world's 20 biggest economies at the weekend.

Industrial metals also dipped and European shares were soft on lingering worries about the economic outlook, especially for the euro zone. While the risk of an inconclusive outcome in Italy's forthcoming election added to investor concerns.

However, activity was curtailed by the closure of markets in the United States for the Presidents' Day holiday.

The yen, which has dropped 20 percent against the dollar since mid-November, fell further after financial leaders from the G20 promised not to devalue their currencies to boost exports and avoided singling out Japan for any direct criticism.

The dollar rose 0.5 percent to 93.95 yen, near a 33-month peak of 94.47 yen set a week ago. The euro added 0.3 percent to 125.40 yen, to be midway between Friday's two-week low of 122.90 and a 34-month high of 127.71 yen hit earlier this month.

Strategists said the yen was likely to stay weak, though its decline could lose momentum until it becomes clear who will be taking the helm at the Bank of Japan when the current governor steps down on March 19.

"The yen probably will weaken a little further in anticipation of more aggressive easing under a new leadership team at the Bank of Japan," said Julian Jessop, chief global economist at Capital Economics.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is poised to nominate the new governor in the next few days. Sources have told Reuters that former financial bureaucrat Toshiro Muto, considered likely to be less radical than other candidates, was leading the field.

Meanwhile the euro dipped slightly against the dollar when European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said the currency's recent gains made any rise in inflation less likely and added that he had yet to see any improvement in the euro zone economy.

Speaking before the European Parliament, Draghi said the euro's exchange rate was not a policy target but was important for growth and stability, adding that appreciation of the euro "is a risk".

The comments left the euro down 0.2 percent at $1.3334.

Elsewhere in the currency market, sterling hit a seven-month low against the dollar, after a key policymaker made comments about the need for further weakness and recent poor data which has kept alive worries of another British recession.

Sterling fell 0.25 percent to $1.5476 having earlier touched $1.5438, its lowest since July 13.

DATA LOOMS

A big week for data on the outlook for the world's economy weighed on other riskier asset markets following the recent dire fourth-quarter growth numbers for the euro zone and Japan, along with Friday's soft U.S. manufacturing figures.

In European markets, attention is focused on the euro area Purchasing Managers' Indexes for February and German sentiment indices due later in the week which could affect hopes for a recovery this year.

Analysts expect Thursday's euro area flash PMI indices, which offer pointers to economic activity around six months out, to show growth stabilizing across the recession-hit region, leaving intact hopes for a recovery in the second half of 2013.

Concerns over an inconclusive outcome in the Italian election on Sunday and Monday have added to the weaker sentiment as a fragmented parliament could hamper a future government's efforts to reform the struggling economy.

The worries about the outlook for Italy were encouraging investors back into safe-haven German government bonds on Monday, with 10-year Bund yields easing 3.5 basis points to be around 1.63 percent.

"Political uncertainty will keep Bunds well bid this week," ING rate strategist Alessandro Giansanti said, adding that only better than expected economic data could create selling pressure on German debt in the near term.

Italian 10-year yields were 4 basis points higher on the day at 4.41 percent.

EARNINGS HIT

European equity markets were taking their lead from corporate earnings reports which have been reflecting the sluggish economic conditions across the region.

Danish brewer Carlsberg , which generates just over 60 percent of its sales in western Europe, became the latest to report a weaker-than-expected quarterly profit, sending its shares to their lowest level in almost a month.

The 5.8-percent drop for shares in the world's fourth biggest brewery helped send the FTSEurofirst 300 index <.fteu3> of top European shares down 0.2 percent. Germany's DAX <.gdaxi>, France's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Britain's FTSE-100 <.ftse> ranged between 0.4 percent up and 0.15 percent lower.

Earlier, the G20 statement and subsequent comment from Prime Minster Abe indicating a renewed drive to stimulate the Japanese economy lifted the Nikkei stock index <.n225> by 2.1 percent, near to its highest level since September 2008.

MSCI's world equity index <.miwd00000pus> was flat as markets extended a two-week period of consolidation that has followed the big run-up in January, when demand was buoyed by the efforts of central banks to stimulate the world economy.

Data from EPFR Global, a U.S.-based firm that tracks the flows and allocations of funds globally, shows investors pulled $3.62 billion from U.S. stock funds in the latest week, the most in 10 weeks after taking a neutral stance the prior week.

But demand for emerging market equities remained strong, with investors putting $1.81 billion in new cash into stock funds, the fund-tracking firm said.

CHINA RETURN

In the commodity markets, traders played catch-up after a week-long holiday last week in China, the world's second biggest consumer of many raw materials, which had kept activity subdued, with worries about the economic outlook weighing on sentiment.

Copper, for which China is the world's largest consumer, dipped to a near three-week low at $8,125.25 a metric ton (1.1023 tons) on the London futures market. Benchmark tin and nickel also touched three-week lows.

Gold managed to edge away from six-month lows as jewelers in China returned to the physical market after the Lunar New Year holiday but a lack of demand from U.S. markets saw the precious metal slip back to be down 0.1 percent to $1,607.06 an ounce.

Crude oil markets were mostly steady after the weak U.S. industrial production data on Friday [ID:nL1N0BF44A] was seen dampening demand, while tensions in the Middle East lent some support.

"We continue to see a mixed picture out of the United States. Industry output was lower than expected but that shouldn't affect the general upward direction," Olivier Jakob, analyst at Geneva-based Petromatrix, said.

Brent crude was down 20 cents at $117.46 a barrel after posting its first weekly loss since the first half of January. U.S. crude slipped 24 cents to $95.62.

(Additional reporting by Marius Zaharia and Ron Bousso; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Alastair Macdonald)

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As Assad Holds Firm, Obama Could Revisit Arms Policy

WASHINGTON — When President Obama rebuffed four of his top national security officials who wanted to arm the rebels in Syria last fall, it put an end to a months-long debate over how aggressively Washington should respond to the strife there that has now left nearly 70,000 dead.

Reuters

A Free Syrian Army member smokes a cigarette inside a factory producing improvised mortar shells.

But the decision also left the White House with no clear strategy to resolve a crisis that has bedeviled it since a popular uprising erupted against President Bashar al-Assad almost two years ago. Despite an American program of nonlethal assistance to opponents of the Syrian government and $365 million in humanitarian aid, Mr. Obama appears to be running out of options to speed Mr. Assad’s exit.

With conditions continuing to deteriorate, officials said, the president could reopen the question of whether to provide weapons to select members of the resistance in an effort to break the impasse in Syria. The question is whether a wary Mr. Obama, surrounded by a new national security team, would come to a different conclusion.

“This is not a closed decision,” a senior administration official insisted. “As the situation evolves, as our confidence increases, we might revisit it.”

Mr. Obama’s refusal to provide arms when the proposal was broached before the November election, officials said, was driven by his reluctance to get drawn into a proxy war and his fear that the weapons would end up in unreliable hands, where they could be used against civilians or Israeli and American interests.

As the United States struggles to formulate a policy, however, Mr. Assad has given no sign that he is ready to yield power, and the Syrian resistance is adamant that it will not negotiate a transition in which he has a role. Mr. Obama, in his State of the Union address, did not repeat his oft-stated confidence that Mr. Assad’s days are numbered.

Even if Mr. Assad was overthrown, the convulsion could fragment Syria along sectarian and ethnic lines, each supported by competing outside powers, said Paul Salem, who runs the Beirut-based Middle East office for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Syria,” he said, “is in the process, not of transitioning, but disintegrating.”

The State Department has funneled $50 million of nonlethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, including satellite telephones, radios, broadcasting equipment, computers, survival equipment and the training in how to use them. This support, officials say, has helped Syrians opposed to the Assad regime communicate with one another and the outside world, despite efforts by Syrian forces to target rebel communications using Iranian-supplied equipment. A Syria-wide FM radio network is to connect broadcasting operations in several cities in the next several days. The State Department has also helped train local councils in areas that have freed from the Syrian government’s control.

But the State Department does not provide non-lethal assistance to armed rebel factions. This has greatly limited the influence the United States has with armed groups that are likely to control much of Syria if Mr. Assad is ousted..

“The odds are very high that, for better or worse, armed men will determine Syria’s course for the foreseeable future,” said Frederic C. Hof, a former senior State Department official and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “For the U.S. not to have close, supportive relationships with armed elements, carefully vetted, is very risky.”

Because units of the anti-Assad Free Syria Army have captured prisoners and detained criminals in the areas they control, Mr. Hof said, it is essential that either the United States or an ally train rebel staff officers in judicial procedures and sensitive them to human rights concerns.

While the White House has focused on the risks of providing weapons, other nations have had no such reservations. Russia has continued to provide arms and financial support to the Assad government. Iran has supplied the regime with weapons and Quds Force advisers. Hezbollah has sent militants to Syria to help Mr. Assad’s forces. On the other side of the struggle, anti-government Qaeda-affiliated fighters have been receiving financial and other support from their backers in the Middle East.

The arming plan that was considered last year originated with David H. Petreaus, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was supported by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The goal was to create allies in Syria with whom the United States could work during the conflict and if Mr. Assad was removed from power. Each had their reasons for supporting it.

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Burger King plans apology after Twitter hack

Somebody hacked Burger King‘s Twitter account on Monday, posting obscene messages and changing its profile picture to a McDonald‘s logo.

The tweets stopped after a little more than an hour, and Burger King said it had reached out to Twitter to suspend the account. A Twitter spokesman did not immediately respond to a phone message left on Monday.

Burger King, which usually tweets several times a week, said it was working to get the account back up. Typical tweets promoted sales on chicken sandwiches, or asked how many bites it takes to eat a chicken nugget.

But just after noon EST on Monday, someone tweeted via Burger King’s account, “We just got sold to McDonalds!” They also changed the icon to rival McDonald Corp.‘s golden arches and the account’s background picture to McDonald’s new Fish McBites.

About 55 tweets and retweets followed over the next hour and a quarter, including some that contained racial epithets, references to drug use and obscenities. The account tweeted: “if I catch you at a wendys, we’re fightin!”

Monday’s appropriation of Burger King’s Twitter account was a relatively mild example of cybersecurity problems, which are causing increasing concern in Washington and for industry. Media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have all said this year that their computer systems were breached, while several NBC websites were briefly hacked in November. White House officials and some lawmakers are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for the government and industry to share information on how to defend against hacking.

Burger King didn’t know who hacked the account, and no other social media accounts were affected, said Bryson Thornton, a spokesman for Miami-based Burger King Worldwide Inc. Its social media team and an outside agency manage the Twitter account, but Thornton declined to say how many people knew the account’s password. He said they hope to have it working again soon, and will post a statement on Facebook later Monday apologizing for the tweets.

Twitter acknowledged on Feb. 1 that cyber attackers may have stolen user names and passwords of 250,000 users. It said at the time that it notified users of the breach.

Competitors were sympathetic.

McDonald’s responded on Twitter that it empathized with its Burger King counterparts. “Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”

“My real life nightmare is playing out” on Burger King’s twitter feed, wrote Wendy’s social media worker Amy Rose Brown.

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Boy George Shows Off Dramatic Weight Loss in London

By Maggie Coughlan

02/18/2013 at 05:30 PM EST

Boy George, before (left) and after

Samir Hussein/Getty; Landov

By George, he's lost it!

Boy George showed off a svelte new figure when attending the Whatsonstage.com Awards on Sunday night in London.

Sporting his trademark eyeshadow, Boy George, 51, wore all black, save for a baby blue tie and beige hat, to the event.

As he's shed the pounds, the singer-songwriter has documented his journey on Twitter, sharing everything from advice from his doctor to reactions on his healthy lifestyle.

"I've been doing burst of exercise all day and everyone thinks I'm a bit mental! Lol!" he Tweeted on Jan. 31.

Then on Feb. 8, Boy George shared his breakfast. "Mmm, porridge with cherries & a dash of cinnamon! Cook the cherries with the porridge! Bloody gorgeous!" he Tweeted.

The former Culture Club frontman also attributes his new figure to Freer Nutrition, a weight-loss program headed by a nutritional therapist, calling it his "secret."

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UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows

GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.

U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.

Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.

He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.

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G20 steps back from currency brink, heat off Japan

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no currency war and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets, underlining broad concern about the fragile state of the world economy.

Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped direct criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by policymakers from the G20, which spans developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.

Analysts said the yen, which has dropped 20 percent as a result of aggressive monetary and fiscal policies to reflate the Japanese economy, may now continue to fall.

"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."

After late-night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.

A draft communiqué on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed only at price stability and growth.

"The mood quite clearly early on was that we needed desperately to avoid protectionist measures ... that mood permeated quite quickly," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters, adding that the wording of the G20 statement had been hardened up by the ministers.

As a result, it reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's proclamation by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

As with the G7 intervention, Tokyo said it gave it a green light to pursue its policies unchecked.

"I have explained that (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe's administration is doing its utmost to escape from deflation and we have gained a certain understanding," Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters.

"We're confident that if Japan revives its own economy that would certainly affect the world economy as well. We gained understanding on this point."

Flaherty admitted it would be difficult to gauge if domestic policies were aimed at weakening currencies or not.

NO FISCAL TARGETS

The G20 also made a commitment to a credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals as most delegations felt any economic recovery was too fragile.

The communiqué said risks to the world economy had receded but growth remained too weak and unemployment too high.

"A sustained effort is required to continue building a stronger economic and monetary union in the euro area and to resolve uncertainties related to the fiscal situation in the United States and Japan, as well as to boost domestic sources of growth in surplus economies," it said.

A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.

The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt targets.

"We had a broad consensus in the G20 that we will stick to the commitment to fulfill the Toronto goals," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. "We do not have any interest in U.S.-bashing ... In St. Petersburg follow-up-goals will be decided."

The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.

Backing in the communiqué for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.

QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but has also unleashed destabilising capital flows into emerging markets.

A commitment to minimize such "negative spillovers" was an offsetting point in the text that China, fearful of asset bubbles and lost export competitiveness, highlighted.

"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.

Russia, this year's chair of the G20, admitted the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.

On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".

It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.

(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)

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IHT Rendezvous: Taming the Runaway U.S. Budget

WASHINGTON — If Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a deficit reduction plan, in two weeks automatic budget cuts will kick in that could severely weaken the U.S. economy and the American military.

As I write in my latest Letter From Washington, there are sensible ways to avoid this, though it is far from certain dysfunctional Washington can achieve them.

One reason is that so much of spending is now hard-wired into the system.

Representative John Dingell of Michigan is the only current member of Congress who served in 1962. Yet he would hard-pressed to recall the federal budget of a half century ago.
In those days, more than two-thirds, 67.5 percent, of spending was discretionary, meaning it had had to be appropriated annually. Almost half the budget went to defense and about 18 percent went to discretionary domestic programs.
Mandatory spending, or entitlements, was only a little more than a quarter of the budget, and more than half of that went for Social Security.
That picture is turned upside down in the current fiscal year. Almost 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending with one $1 of every $5 going to Social Security and $1 in $7 to Medicare and Medicaid. Defense is almost 19 percent, a fraction of what it was in 1962, and domestic discretionary programs, at a little more than 16 percent, takes a smaller proportional bite out of the federal budget than they did a half century ago despite the creation of so many new initiatives.
This isn’t going to change. “Regardless of who is president, what will be spent in any given year will be determined by laws that are already set, some decades earlier,” says Stan Collender, an expert on the federal budget.
Despite the large budget deficits in recent years, interest on the debt payments, at 6.5 percent this year, is almost precisely what it was a half century ago. These payments, however, are expected to climb steadily over the next 50 years. Under current projections, Mr. Collender says, they are on track to become the fastest-growing area of the federal budget.

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