No, he isn't right. It is wrong and wildly misleading to quote "discretionary spending" and leave off the "discretionary".

Yes, of course I knew it was "discretionary spending", because that's the trick everyone uses.

But that's absolutely not how it was presented - it was presented as "fraction of US spending", when it is not, not at all!

The whole idea of "discretionary spending" isn't actually an economics thing, and doesn't apply to any country other than the United States - it really has no practical meaning at all.

The US spends X amount of money. Some of that is arbitrarily labelled "entitlements" and some isn't. X is the number to look at, not X - "entitlements".

Here's an example in real terms. Suppose someone said, "Mika spends a quarter of his money on drugs and alcohol!" You'd think, wow, Mika's in trouble.

But then you discover that taxes, rent and food are considered "entitlements" and aren't counted, so it's actually a couple of hundred dollars.

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Oh, and let's get one thing straight.

The US has spent well over $20 trillion dollars, that's $20 million million dollars, on war in my lifetime and every penny of that was theft from the people of America and the people of the world.

I'm completely anti-military. But we should use the right numbers in our fight against the US military.