Social Security is a public pension system, and is necessarily huge since it serves hundreds of millions of people. It's often excluded from budgetary analyses

Social Security is a public pension system, and is necessarily huge since it serves hundreds of millions of people. It's often excluded from budgetary analyses because it tends to throw everything out-of-whack, and the money that flows into it is separate from ordinary taxes, so isn't available for the general funds anyway—the way it's set up, Congress can't simply redirect Social Security spending to other purposes through anything like the ordinary budget process, they'd have to modify Social Security itself first, then probably weather a torrent of lawsuits.