Pictorial representation of our nation's budget

My friend Dan sent me this link: http://thebudgetgraph.com/ . It's pretty neat as a nice condensed view of our nation's budget. It raises the immediate emotional observation however that 67% of the President's budget is going to military, national security spending. I thought it was useful and interesting for the casual political wannabes, but I pointed out to Dan that it was dangerous to completely rely on it in making decisions.

"Graphs and charts don't capture the rationale and policy underlying them all the time," I said. (or more accurately, wrote in an IM).
"How's that?" Dan asked. "James, the whole left side is the military."
"But someone from outerspace, if they looked at this, would say, 'a war-like culture.' And that is true. But why? The entire complicated series of events leading to the current Middle East Conflict is not captured."

I'm certainly not a fan of Middle East Conflict. (I think the acronym Global War on Terror is another successful naming convention of Pres. Bush's like "Clear Sky Initiative" or "Leave No Child Behind" which all reek of good brand-naming in an advertising sense, but fail miserably in practice because of the real underlying policies that are contrary to the surface brandname.") The lengthy and costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking up a large part of our resources now, but the policies and decisions in reaching the spending are complicated and not as clear-cut for most average citizens to say it is too much. We're in a mess and it's too hard to get out of it overnight, as seen in the Senate earlier this week with Sen. Webb's resolution.

So, the graph is good, but stories are more complicated than the thousands of words that the picture paints.