The outlays shown on the graph already include military spending.

There’s a chart in this paper about seven pages in. Go ahead and subtract the annual numbers from the appropriate point on the outlay graph to see what you get.

Ideally, you’d correct the table to constant 2005 dollars, but I think the difference would be lost in the noise.

You could cut through a lot of the crap by simply noting that the total $1.4 trillion cost of the wars to date (since 2001) aren’t much higher than the deficit for just 2011.

Most Americans, myself included, support entitlement reform and tax reform. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could solve all of our problems in about 10 minutes. It’s a matter of cutting spending and raising revenues. But there is a group of teabagger crazies in Congress who don’t want to solve the nation’s problems, they want to bring down the entire federal government because of their paranoid fears.

They’re mostly “discretionary caps” on future spending, a promise to cut spending down the road. Honest. If you think those cuts will ever take place, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

So it’s the old gag: a tax increase right now, in exchange for nebulous spending cuts later. The Democrats have pulled this more than once.

Remember the “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction” that was supposed to identify $1.2 trillion in budget cuts by November 2011? It disbanded in January 2012 after producing exactly nothing. Put it up on the shelf with Simpson-Bowles.

No real spending cuts have taken place, other than a few billion token cuts. The budget projections from Obama’s last proposal will have us at a budget of $5.5 trillion in ten years.

I’m not addressing the “debt limit fight” because I’m not chasing the red herring. All the propaganda in the next few months is going to be about the debt limit, because the Democrats damn well don’t want to talk about the actual debt.