> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?

> medicaid, medicare

You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.

To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.

> social security, and welfare

Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).

In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.