It depends. Actually finding the answers to your queries has done much to educate me about the Byzantine world of "what counts".
The first bug bear is Social Security; does the author consider it "on budget" or "off budget"? Not a question I even thought to ask initially. The gov't has it "on budget" as of LBJ; critics of this accounting change seem to feel the rationale behind the change was to mask military spending behind a large social expenditure from a self funding program. A program still apparently in surplus, but not for long. So I guess one must ascertain a source's position on this point; as well as questioning whether or not different sources make different assumptions in this regard when calculating "x" as a % of budgetary expenditure.
The second question is: what counts as military spending? Again, different sources count different things. DoD budget alone; Homeland Security?; counter-terrorism expenditures by the FBI? contracting of services to civilian companies for security operations? The difference in "what counts" changes the figure from ~600 billion to over 1 trillion.
So yes, I will have to examine exactly what a source means in terms of "the budget" and "military expenditure"; and will expect no less from others:p
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