I'm pretty sick and tired of hearing deficit hawks of both major parties spewing that nonsense about how the country needs to 'act like a family' in terms of not spending more than they make, etc.
So I propose a set of actions, listed below the fleur de Kos.
Step 1. Collect statements from as many Congresscritters as possible who have used the meme that the country needs to be budgeted like a family, making sure to source each and every one.
If none is available for your Senators or Representative, write their offices, and ask them to let you know if that is something they agree or disagree with. It might help your chances of getting an actual reply from Republican Congresscritters if you haven't written letters blasting them already in past, and make your note sound kind of wingnutty. But try to get them on record as to agreeing with that particular form of nonsense.
Step 2. Also collect statements (whether from press releases or television appearances, or again from writing them directly) asking them if they believe in home ownership, and whether they feel home owners should be forced to pay cash for homes they buy or whether mortgages are an acceptable way to buy homes.
At this point, there should be major cognitive dissonance between their answers. When I was making 18k a year, I bought a 103k home with a fixed 30 year mortgage. Now admittedly, I put money down, so in reality, my mortgage was only for something like 83k. But in one shot, I took my personal debt ratio (personal debt to personal annual income) to 4.6:1. That's the equivalent of the US having a national debt that is 460% of GDP. I've refi'd a couple of times since, but with 7 or so more years to go, my current debt ratio solely from my outstanding mortgage is now something like 8:1.
I may well be atypical, but I think most homebuyers buy homes that are at least 3-5 years worth of their gross income in cost. Now I admit my data might be out of date, but a quick google search shows items talking about Debt running around 100% of GDP within the last year or two.
If the country truly operated like families do, our 'debt ceiling' would easily be triple what it currently is. So these so called deficit hawks don't really believe the country should be 'run like a family'. That's simply rhetoric to confuse voters and make themselves sound 'reasonable'. What they really believe is that we should run the country like a Depression-era family that waits to buy a house until they can pay cash for it.
Which leads us to
Step 3. Taking the Congressional quotes from steps 1 and 2, writing letters to the editor for all major newspaper markets in your Congresspeople's district and state, quoting their supposed beliefs, and showing their desire for the country to 'budget like a family' for the blatant lie that it is. Also forwarding those same letters to any and all Democratic offices of Dems who do NOT buy into the drastic slashing of services as a means to achieve this 'pretend super-family budget' and allowing them to call out their idiot colleagues on the house floor for the pretence, as well as forwarding the letters to all semi-neutral to friendly news outlets.
It would be best if we could do step 3 in unison.
Now while I'm up to coming up with the occasional idea, I'm not an 'organizer' type. If folks think this might be a good idea to 'push back' on at least some of the mainly Republican nonsense tied to the debt ceiling vote, I'd also call for one of our more experienced on-site organizers to take over the reins of collecting and coordinating.
What do folks think?
12:59 PM PT: Sewaneepat did a good diary that discussed how stupid this meme was earlier.