"Just like a household budget"
When politicians are making the case for cutting public services, they often use the analogy of a household budget. If you, the member of the electorate listening to their pitch, are going through financial difficulties, you have to find ways to makes savings, otherwise the problem gets worse. It's a simple analogy, and one most people can relate to. Unfortunately, it's completely inapplicable to the government situation.
Economists can explain better than I can why budgeting is different when you control the money supply, how government spending effectively pays for itself, and why government borrowing is not equivalent to slapping everything on the credit card. These are all very valid points, but there's a more fundamental problem with the analogy. Government cuts don't really map onto anything a normal household would do in tight times.
One thing government and household budgets do have in common is that they have an income side as well as an expenditure side. A household in financial difficulty might well try to address that by increasing income rather than cutting expenditure, by looking for more or better paid work, or by making sure they're claiming everything they're entitled to. So if the government want to use this analogy, they should talk about increasing taxation before they jump to cutting public services.
If they had no way to increase income enough to solve the problem, our hypothetical cash-strapped household would turn to reducing expenditure - but not just any expenditure. They might cut back on nice-to-have things like holidays, nights out, or streaming subscriptions, or they might try to bring their fuel costs down by making their home more energy efficient, but there are certain core expenses they wouldn't consider cutting. Neglecting to pay the mortgage, for instance, would very obviously lead to much bigger problems a few months down the line. Cutting down on feeding the children is, for the majority of households at least, unthinkable abuse.
I'm not sure what the government spending equivalent of nights out and streaming services would be, but I'm fairly sure affordable public transport and support for people too sick to work aren't it. And while politicians talk about finding efficiency savings in big areas like education and health, this too often translates as cutting funding and expecting employees to fill the gap somehow. That's more analogous to cutting your grocery bill by foraging in the woods - it might work in a handful of circumstances, but it's not sustainable in the long term.
If a household can't pay for their core expenses, that's a household in crisis. Every desperate crowdfunder on social media understands that, so it's difficult to imagine the government doesn't see it. And yet they tell us that there's no money for the most basic of government requirements with an air of business as usual. If they really believed their household budget analogy, that would be an absurdly irresponsible attitude to being effectively on the brink of bankruptcy.
Of course, they don't believe the analogy for a moment. It's all messaging, an attempt to camouflage the fact that they've decided certain forms of government spending are not just frivolous but actively illegitimate. They're committed to an ideology that insists the government shouldn't spend money to make the country a better place or the population's lives easier, but they're aware that saying that outright could hurt them in the polls. So they play word games, pretending they're not trying to make our lives harder, or claiming they have no choice in the matter.
But if they truly had no choice, they would be equivalent to that household in crisis. They'd be battling to raise money in any way they could, not blandly issuing statements about "tough decisions" while cutting support for people who are already struggling. Their blandness shows that they do have a choice, that they are choosing this and approve of it. In the end, the talk of household budgets can't disguise that choice.