Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ~60% of the federal budget.

Interest payments are another ~15% and there's no way to reduce those.

You could cut literally every penny of the rest of the budget, including all of defense, all of transportation, all of education, and every single program being discussed here. We'd still have a deficit.

So unless a politician is going to propose a way to spend less on those three programs, then they're not talking seriously about reducing our deficit.