Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson came up with a new metric for measuring the size of the military budget. He told readers that under last week’s debt deal:

“defense spending would shrink to 15 percent of the budget by 2016. This would be the lowest share since before World War II.”

Wow, military spending measured as a share of the budget, what a great concept! The Samuelson measure means that we should be spending more money on the military if we were to have a national health insurance program run through the government, like Medicare. It also implies that if we privatize Medicare and Social Security, then we should cut back the military to keep its share of the budget in its normal historical range.

And remember, you can only find this in the Washington Post.