With all the Republicans around today chanting the fiscal spending mantra you would think that must be part of their very core. I am just a simple fellow but I have been around long enough to know that their new found fiscal religion is just that, new found. I know how all those Washington types love their graphs so I though I would, as usual, put a few on this post.

The Republican’s all seem to wonder how we got into this spending spree? Well the graph above seems to be saying something about that to me.  Military spending was $300 billion in 2000 when the Republicans took over our government. In 2008 when they were kicked out it was almost $700 billion. I don’t have a big fancy computer like some of those folks have but even doing the math in my head that is a pretty big part of the overspending to me. $400 billions, even those politicians would surely say that is not small change. And I don’t think this is the only place where they spent more than they needed. But I will have to study on that some more.

Thinking about all this money I wanted to compare my income in 2000 to that in 2010 and guess what? It shows less than a 10% increase over those ten years. That is less than 1% per year. Given that my medical insurance is now 10 times higher than it was ten years ago I don’t seem to be getting anywhere but closer to a hole either. But I can’t spend like a drunken sailor like some folks I know 🙂

The politicians like to spout off that Medicare is also a big contributor to the deficits but I did some figuring on that also and found it to be pretty much a result of the increased medical costs. If we could get those drug companies to cut us a little slack in their ever increasing profits and those big time doctors to not demand $10,000 per hour for their time we could pretty much bring Medicare into line, at least for now. I’ll have more to say about that the next time. But my brain is kind of overheated  right now with all this serious thinking!! I need to let it cool down a little first. I don’t want it to get so bad that I have to go to the doctor. That might break me!!

But what do I know?