It becomes false when you remove the "discretionary" from the label and just call it Federal Spending. And the the labels aren't that useful anyway. Mandatory s

It becomes false when you remove the "discretionary" from the label and just call it Federal Spending. And the the labels aren't that useful anyway. Mandatory spending isn't mandatory, it is just pre-programmed. One the main reasons we are in debt is that the only place that there has been any focus on cuts is the discretionary side. And if you make across the board cuts in discretionary spending as happened with the Obama budget deal, that pie chart doesn't change because there is no visualization of it shrinking versus the other 50%+ of spending. Defense spending had been shrinking for the last 5 years as a percentage of GDP.