Maybe it was the Novocaine, but last week I had an epiphany:
This country has been run by insane people for this entire century.
We started out the 2000s with no deficits and no wars.
We ended up with more debt than we can count and more wars than we can count.
I gleaned this knowledge as I was having a couple of crowns installed by my dentist. He's got a TV set up by the chair and the patient can pick the channel.
I figured I'd get some work done as I sat there, so I chose C-SPAN. They were showing a rerun of Mick Mulvaney's confirmation hearing before a Senate committee Tuesday.
Mulvaney is a congressman from South Carolina who has been nominated by President Trump to head the Office of Management and Budget.
He is what's known as a "deficit hawk," a fiscal conservative whose main concern is the massive debt the United States has been running up.
In this, he clashes both with his own party and his own president.
Senate Republicans recently passed a resolution permitting budget deficits through 2026.
Meanwhile Trump has said he wants to increase military spending. Mulvaney seeks to cut it - and everything else.
This is where the insanity comes in. The sole GOP dissenting vote on that budget bill came from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul and his father, Ron Paul, have been the loudest voices of dissent within the GOP on the many military actions the U.S. has been involved in since 9/11.
For this they were labeled as the crazy people in their party. The sane ones were the guys who borrowed trillions to blow things up in the Mideast, first under George W. Bush and then under Barack Obama.
Bush used those wars as an excuse to ignore his campaign promises to balance the budget. As for Obama, at least he had the excuse that as a Democrat he never made any such promises.
But between the two of them they stuck us with a giant debt with little or nothing to show for it. Mulvaney put that debt into perspective by stating "If you are an ordinary American family, the equivalent to you of a $20 trillion debt is a credit card bill of $260,000."
That's one way of looking at it. Another came when he got a question about what would happen if the economy heats up, as everyone hopes it does, and interest rates rise a point.
That would increase the annual interest debt-service payment by $200 billion, he replied. That's a third of the defense budget.
And then there's Social Security - a perfect topic to ponder while your teeth are getting drilled. The 49-year-old Mulvaney was asked what will happen if we don't either cut benefits, raise taxes, or both.
"If we do nothing, then by the time I retire, there will be an across-the-board 22 percent cut to Social Security benefits," he replied. "Without changing the current Social Security program, a 40-year-old today will receive roughly 77 percent of what they've been promised for their adult life."
Medicare? Medicaid? Again, getting your teeth drilled is more pleasant than listening to the details of those programs.
The question of retirement funding brings up another major screw-up from the Bush crowd. Bush made privatizing Social Security his highest priority. The big problem was where to come up with the $1.2 trillion needed to fund the transition.
Instead of addressing that, Bush promptly blew through a few trillion starting wars he had no idea how to win. And instead of fixing Medicare, he added a prescription-drug benefit that adds half a trillion a year to the debt.
As for Obama, he came into office with a Nobel Peace Prize - and promptly started wars in Libya and Syria. Oh yeah, we're also blowing stuff up with drones in Yemen.
Why? No one even asks. Getting Americans to care about foreign policy is like pulling teeth.
The same goes for budgetary matters. By the end of that hearing, Mulvaney had been blasted by both sides. The Republican wanted him to promise to spend more on the military. The Democrats wanted him to spend more on social programs.
That we don't have the money for either did not enter into their calculations.
My time in the chair ended with no physical pain. Perhaps that was because of the skill of my dentist. Or perhaps because the pain in my head from hearing all those numbers distracted me.
But it gave me a new perspective on the charges from all my liberal friends that the new president is crazy.
Perhaps he is.
In that case, he's perfect for the job.
BELOW: I realize few people enjoy this kind of thing, but here goes: