It gives people a baseline for where to start in any discussions regarding the Federal budget, whether that’s immediately actionable, it is useful to have the v

It gives people a baseline for where to start in any discussions regarding the Federal budget, whether that’s immediately actionable, it is useful to have the vocabulary to discuss the budget if you’re going to talk about it at all. I’m occasionally having to correct people who believe and are insistent that our largest ticket spending item is the Military. It’s certainly the largest part of our discretionary budget, but if you’re going to talk about the Federal budget, it is unhelpful to disregard the non-discretionary budget that goes mostly into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and giving people an education on discretionary vs non-discretionary spending drags out conversations; then it’s a coin toss if that person retains any of that the next time you talk politics, or if it got muddled up in their minds by poor news reporting in-between, the news they follow to “stay informed”.