Back in October I wrote a blog post here about how much the U.S. spends on diplomacy and foreign aid. "Very little," I wrote back then.

The Medicare program accounts for around 14 percent of the entire federal budget, but you wouldn’t know it from USAspending.gov, a website that’s supposed to make government spending transparent. If you use it to investigate how much the government spent on Medicare benefits last year, you’ll find a surprising number: zero.