Does this include discretionary spending? I feel like that's pretty essential to understanding exactly what's going on... Mil-spending would look a lot more massive, I believe.
Basically everything beyond Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is discretionary spending. If you get rid of those, then yes, military spending looks huge as a share of discretionary spending.
There are dozens of sites breaking down the spending (this is just another attempt at visualizing the data). A quick search led me to http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-1... where you can find discretionary spending separated out on its own.
Well, if you mean [some people] get together and figure out what to do spend money on and call it "the budget." Yes, I guess so.
But I mean, my understanding is that there is un-allotted money the government is willing to spend, beyond whatever budget they approve. My understanding was that, in particular, the military budget increases dramatically under these mechanisms.
Also - Social Security should also be separate, really, it's a trust fund with a very specific money - if we turned Social Security off tomorrow, it isn't like the money collected could go elsewhere. Money collected into that fund & being spent into that fund should not be able to be reallocated elsewhere.
There are dozens of sites breaking down the spending (this is just another attempt at visualizing the data). A quick search led me to http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-1... where you can find discretionary spending separated out on its own.