Defense spending way down.

Rob Bluey points out the Heritage Foundation's new book of federal spending and revenue charts. While there's a lot of interesting stuff to peruse, what caught my eye was this chart showing that even with the post-9/11 increase in military spending, "at 4 percent of GDP, defense spending is one and a half percentage points of GDP below the 45-year historical average and well below Cold War and Vietnam War levels." The chart, I would argue, can be explained by this other chart showing the explosive growth of mandatory spending.

"Guns and Butter Revisited." By Philip Klein, AmSpecBlog, 3/14/07 (links omitted).