While most of us are trying to figure out how to pay for goods and groceries amid sky-high inflation and many companies were deciding how many people to lay off so they can make a profit, our lawmakers were busy trying to figure out how much more of our money they could spend.

The budget process in Washington is so broken I don’t know if it can ever be fixed.

Instead of a budget, they put together a spending program passed it, bragged about it, patted themselves on the back and went home for the holidays.

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I expect this kind of behavior from Democrats but even Republicans, who during the mid-term elections were warning us that the government spending too much money was causing inflation, voted for the so-called budget.

They should all be fired.

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The fiscal year 2023 budget allows for $1.65 trillion in federal spending. The Democrats insisted that more money needed to be spent on social programs to help people deal with inflation, but in doing so will put more people in need of social programs.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the process was “unacceptable and said the democrats failed to get their work done on time saying, “In reality… this bill should have been passed in September of this year,” Hoyer said. “Why? Because the fiscal year ends on September 30th, and fiscal year ’23 begins on October 1st of this year.”

And what’s up with the $15 billion in earmarks — what many consider money for lawmaker’s pet projects — that were attached to the budget. I thought we were done with earmarks, but I guess not.

According to the New York Times, “The bill contains more than 7,200 earmarks, up from 4,962 that totaled $9 billion in the last spending package, which passed in April. The increase, lawmakers and experts said, could be the result of congressional members learning how to navigate a practice that was resurrected earlier this year with passage of the last spending bill, after a decade in which funding for the projects, often derided as ‘pork,’ was banned.”

We know the Democrats have been so busy trying to bury Donald Trump that they couldn’t possibly have put together a commonsense budget. What the Republicans were doing during this time I don’t know.

So, instead the Democrats threw together all their bills into a 4,100-page document and threw it out to lawmakers with only days to go over it before they voted on it.

I would have rather they shut the government down, lock all the lawmakers into their separate meeting places and make them produce a budget that shows they are beholding to their constituents. For all the money we pay them, we deserve a better outcome.

It’s time to clean up the swamp and get new people in there who truly want to work for us.