A Budget Plan: Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford

Some 75 new Republican members of Congress got there by promising to stop the federal government’s massive overspending. And as Chris Edwards noted, there have been a number of lists of budget cuts proposed recently.


Saturday Night Live did a sketch back in 2007 that might be useful to Tea Partiers and new members of Congress. It’s about a self‐​help plan called “Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford.” Since the federal government is running deficits well over a trillion dollars a year, I’d say this plan would be good advice:

Hat tip to Jonathan Witt at the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog, who points out that if this were a perfect analogy, the book author would be more agitated because “the couple has been spending the author’s money using a credit card he had idiotically loaned them a few years before.”