One explanation is that medical spending essentially increases on autopilot while spending on nonmedical services generally does not. State governments know the federal government will match their Medicaid spending. The federal government will do no such thing if a state government, say, provides subsidized employment opportunities for people who've just left prison. The things government does to help people that don't involve modern medicine--the policies that get people back to work, give them the skills they need, help them deal with the challenges of raising young children, and much else--are funded by a grab bag of programs that have seen their funding grow slowly, if at all. Some of these programs work well, and many others do not.

Activists wearing the masks of the seven leaders of G7, from left, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni, British Prime Minister Theresa May, U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sit at a table eating mock pasta during an initiative by Oxfam, an international confederation of NGOS aimed at fighting poverty, ahead of the G7 summit scheduled for May 26 and 27 in Taormina, Italy, Thursday, May 25, 2017.

Iraqi forces have retaken the main government compound in the centre of Fallujah from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, top commanders say. The government lost control of Fallujah in 2014, months before ISIL took Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, and swept across large parts of the country. "The counterterrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Fallujah," the operation's overall commander, Lieutenant-General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, told AFP on Friday. The Iraqi flag is now raised on top of the building, symbolising government control. Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq's federal police chief, confirmed the advance, which marks a significant step in the nearly four-week-old offensive to retake the city in Anbar province.

There was hardly any celebration even after US President Donald Trump announced the government would reopen for three weeks, ending the longest shutdown. Reopening federal agencies will be a slow process. Many government workers are worried they won't get regular paycheques for long.

"What commonly happens in the invention process is that people are driven by the constant irritations and annoyances of life," Hobson said. "And traffic lights appear to have a malicious intent whenever you approach them." Waiting at a red light, he noticed a tremendous amount of traffic in one direction but nobody in the other. Yet the traffic lights still obediently kept to their programmed pace of red, yellow, green. Worse: the light tried to accommodate non-existent pedestrians, further delaying things.