Measuring discretionary spending isn't skewing the results.

With regard to discretionary spending; there is a difference between including it as part of the US budget and portraying it as the US budget. I only cited is as an example; I make no claims about any particular survey.

Sorry about that, was in a rush. Here's one for total spending:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2...

Here's one for discretionary:

http://www.cdi.org/issues/discret.html

Here's one in relation to GDP, as well as historical discretionary:

http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php

there is a difference between including it as part of the US budget and portraying it as the US budget

Yes, absolutely. I think one would have to be quite confused about all this to mix up the two. One is what the president proposes and congress debates and votes on. The other is that, plus the laws that have already been passed in the past. The GDP figure is even farther complicated by uncertain estimates.

This might be my bias coming in, but it's pretty clear that if you want to talk about what our elected officials are doing with our money, we have to talk about discretionary spending.