November 4, 2010 3:13PM # A Budget Plan: Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE 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](https://www.cato.org/what-spending-should-the-gop-cut/) 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](http://blog.acton.org/archives/19186-snl-skit-to-congress-dont-buy-stuff-you-cant-afford.html), 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.” ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).