It’s nice to see Ruth Marcus use some simple common sense in her Post column today. She criticizes the flap over the $16 breakfast muffin (which turns out not to be true). She then points to other big flaps over very little money.

The points are well-taken. Many budget battles are over trivial portions of the budget. (John McCain made a $1 million appropriation [0.00003 percent of federal spending] a centerpiece of his 2008 presidential campaign.) It would be great if the Post would use its news pages to educate the public about where the real spending takes place, for example by routinely expressing spending and tax items as shares of the budget. It would also be useful if it started pointing out the fact that the long-term deficit problem is entirely the result of our broken health care system.