The Middle Class is being Abandoned

When I think about the Federal budget and how annual deficits lead to large debts, I like to look at numbers.  Charts and graphs are the only way to parse the data and see what's what.  That's what I would like to do here, because I don't see anyone else doing it.

The noise on TV is coming from the children we have sent to Washington.  Not one of them, not a single one, has the interest of the Middle Class at heart.  This country prospers when the Middle Class has decent jobs that allow them to save and purchase goods and services.  This congress and this president are ignoring the numbers and fighting over ideology rather than working on a real solution to our budget problems.

• Our tax reveues are not high enough to meet our expenditures.  We don't bring in enough money  to fund everything we would like to so we borrow.  Here's a chart that shows that very plainly.  Not enough blue bar, too much red bar.

• The defense budget is out of control. The defense budget for fiscal year (FY) 2000 was around $300 billion dollars.  In 2010 it was just over $700 billion.  This is not sustainable.  Look at the chart.  See the green in the yearly columns?  Using that as a base we have spent an additional 2.6 trillion dollars over the last ten years.  Our debt is 14 trillion dollars.  That means two presidents and five congresses have contributed 18% of the debt in just ten years.  That is not something reasonable people do.

Looking at the charts gives us insight to the problem.  We can see that difficult choices need to be made. I'll bet the Middle Class is going to bear the brunt of those difiicult choices, too.  Later this week we'll examine what's being floated and how it will impact us.