Think of it this way. Your monthly income is $2000 and your monthly spending is $3700. You tell your family that you MUST cut back spending. After deliberating, they agree that they can cut $5 from spending.
A great description, but let's up the accuracy a few notches:
You are your family's sole provider, and your monthly income is about $2,000 a month ($23,000 a year). Your wife Angie and teenage daughter Britney are regularly spending over $3,000 a month ($37,000 a year).
This means you're personally going $14,000 more into debt every single year. Never mind saving anything, you're going $1,170 deeper into debt every single month, with no end in sight.
You tell the family you can't do this, that it's rapidly bankrupting you.
So wifey promises to solve the family's ongoing financial crisis. She proposes that she and Britney, instead of eating out together twice a week, will eat at home instead. This will let them trim $83 a month from the budget, or $1000 a year.
Mom and Britney then engage in a heated argument over whether they should cut $50 from the monthly budget, or just skip a meal at McDonald's, thus saving $7.22 a month. When Mom (the "fiscal conservative") wins the argument, Britney says "the hell we will," slams the door, and storms out of the house.
And those, in fact, are the actual household figures.
The federal government is currently spending your household into oblivion to the tune of $14,000 in ADDITIONAL debt per year, on top of the massive debt they've already run up in your name.
The Republicans bravely proposed that they might cut that down to running up only $13,000 more in additional debt in your family's name every year.
Now they've backed off of "saving" you $83 a month, down to "saving" you $50 a month, or $610 a year.
The Democrats have a counter proposal that will save you about $7 a month instead.
All the while running up additional debt in your name to the amount of around $1,170.
Each and every month.