Lady H and I are both self-employed, have been for many years. Our businesses are feeling the crunch like everyone else. We’re hanging in there, but money isn’t as plentiful as it has been previously. So what have we done? Simple. We don’t eat out as much. We don’t travel as much, even places like Dayton that we really wanted to go. We’re more careful about what we spend. We prioritize.

Has no one thought to explain this to congress. I have to believe there are ways to cut spending, “tighten our belts” so to speak.

We have very well paid government agencies that are involved in things that are totally useless. If the U.S. was a business, wouldn’t we want a businessman running it? Cutting the fat out would ease the tax burden and deficit immensely. Easing the tax burden on businesses and individuals would encourage expansion, which would ease unempoyment, which would encourage spending.

Granted this wouldn’t solve the entire problem. Healthcare is certainly an issue that needs to be dealt with. BUT, in my simple life, I would start with reducing what I spend. Decide what I really need and what I just want. Do what I have to do to survive financially while I work on the other problems.

Oh, and while we’re “cutting the fat”, I can think of about 535 “public servants” that I’d like to see drawnig unemployment checks.

This isnt republican or democrat…it was caused by both and it needs to start getting fixed

Then it did.

and old phils work. you may remember phil he said we are a nation of whiners.He caused the meltdown of the economy because he finished deregulating this scumbags.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000

Now, when I say that to people – especially people who get health insurance through work and make $20 co-pays at the doctor – they tell me I’m crazy. But here are real world figures. I am self-employed. As a result, I purchase high deductible health insurance for myself and my family on the open market. In 2000, we paid $10,581 for health care – $6228 in premiums for a policy with a $5,000 annual deductible and $4,353 in out of pocket expenses.

In 2009, we paid $19,101 – $12,196 in health insurance premiums and $6,905 in out of pocket expenses. This is not a Cadillac policy – we have a $15,000 annual deductible. By the way – no one in my family has any illnesses. My wife and I both take one prescription, and we both get $4 a month generics, so you’re talking $100 in prescriptions. The rest is routine medical care – annual physicals for me, my wife and daughter; two visits a year to the dentist; eye checkups and new glasses; the occasional visit for bronchitis, the flu. Routine stuff. Want to know what it costs to visit the doctor if you’re not making a $20 co-pay? About $200 if there are no Minit Clinics in your area.

Basically, you’re talking a double in ten years, or an 8% a year increase in costs. Double the above, and the average family purchasing a high deductible health plan on the open market, will pay over $38,000 a year by 2019 in routine health care costs. God forbid your kid breaks her arm and you have to go to the emergency room for an X-ray, as happened to my kid a couple of years ago. That was nearly $3,000.

Now, the average cost of a corporate-provided health insurance plan today is $12,319 per employee – not per family – and the average out of pocket expense is $3,200, per person, not per family. Those are not liberal talking points: They come from Hewitt Associates, a benefits management company that provides benefit management services to Fortune 500 companies. That’s an average of $15,519 per year per employee – so, in ten years, you’re looking at a $31,000 a year cost per employee to corporate America. Not per family.

The Republican response, as stated in the WSJ yesterday, is a plan to give every family a $5,200 tax deduction to purchase “affordable health insurance.”

So, instead, of spending $19,100 this year, I would have spent $13,900. For a policy with a $15,000 annual deductible. And no one has any illnesses. Now, I make a good living. But the average family income in America is about $52,000. Tell me how many average families do you know that can spend nearly 30% of their income on health care when most families already spend 26 to 30% of their incomes on housing? You’ve now consumed 60% of the pretax income before you’ve put food in the fridge, gas in the car, or clothes on your back.

The math does not work. Well, maybe porn math.

The fact is that lenders were so hot to package new mortgage derivatives that they went way beyond giving loans to first-time home buyers who couldn’t afford down payments – they started giving loans to people whose income and even credit reports they didn’t bother to check. If you could fill out the paperwork, these banks wanted you to have a mortgage. They weren’t forced to do this. They wanted to give you a mortgage, which, through the magic of fraudulent accounting and crooked ratings institutions, became mortgage derivatives that could be sold with AAA ratings…until the mortgagees whose income the lenders didn’t even check, began to go belly up.