Currently, very little of the DoE budget is "military" or even military related. While that wasn't true 20 or 30 years ago, it is now due to the DOE being much more involved in actual energy production, instead of simply the rapid release of energy over enemy targets.
And that war resistors chart is flawed on so many levels, but a few glaring ones:
1. It assumes that 80% of the interest payments on the national debt are military spending because it assumes that 80% of the debt is due to military spending. This alone is enough to discredit it...money is fungible, you can't simply state that since if we didn't spend any on military (up until recently) we wouldn't have significant deficits, a more appropriate method would be to assume a fraction of the debt payments equal to the the total of the deficit of each year, multiplied by the fraction of spending that year that was military.
2. It counts only DISCRETIONARY spending, thereby omitting nearly 1.5 trillion/year (I presume on purpose to make the defense wedge bigger). Now, libs will argue that because entitlements are codified spending by law, they can never be changed...however, to do so means they effectively guarantee receipt of funds paid, which is not only against SCOTUS precedent, but also means the deems favorite "budget balancing" method of raiding the SS and FICA "trust funds" (note, there really is no such thing, SS and FICA revenues enter the general fund just like normal taxes, any revenues over what is required for outlays of those programs are kept in the general fund, and the treasury records it as an intergovernmental transfer or IOU to those programs...this is how Clinton balanced the budget.
Right now, by any accounting method, even assuming a correct portion of the interest payment, and all non DOD defense spending is included, the number is still shy of 25%. (btw, using that method, to be honest, the intergovernmental transfers should also be included and their impact on the interest payments added, in proportion to their fraction of the total of publicly held and inter government debt, which makes their pie even bigger).
My favorite argument about entitlements is how pols say any future reduction in their planned distributions is horrifying, and until their "trust funds" are exhausted, they are "in the black" and don't add to the deficit, yet their unfunded liabilities are not included in the balance sheet. Our government finances are fundamentally flawed on this level, in any negotiation, we use accrual accounting ("blah blah will save X over 10 years"), yet when talking about debts, we use cash accounting (unfunded liabilities are not current payables, thus zero impact)...if a business did this, they ironically would be charged with a crime. A proper method of accounting is to use the current law as the payables, and adjust to current spending based on a net present value formula. Of course, they won't do this because in effect, it would mean being able to ensure you can pay for things in the future when you promise them today (like a business), AND it would make the current debt even more horrifying (nearly doubling if NPV is used), and make the effective deficit almost triple (since we would have to have the revenues now to address the future shortfalls)
