Imagine the provincial government’s finances like a household budget:

Your spouse (provincial NDP government) walks in the house, bursts into the kitchen and cries in your direction “where are those credit card application forms? We need to get two more cards as soon as possible as I just got a five per cent pay cut at work.”

At first panic sets in, you reach for a bottle of Advil and begin sweating about how on earth your family could possibly cope, but then you take a deep breath.

You close the bottle, sit down and reflect on how your spouse has seen large pay increases (tax revenues) over the past decade. You also recall how your spouse’s rich uncle (the federal government) has been giving the family oodles of cash each year.

While nervously unfolding and refolding a napkin at the table, you begin to reflect on your household budget and spending over the past decade. Wow, have you ever been on a roll.

You’ve been replacing your two cars every three years, built an in ground pool in the backyard, renovated the basement, replaced the carpets on the main floor, put a hot tub in the master bedroom and finally bought that canopy bed you’ve always wanted.

Junior just got a couple new video game systems, you sent him off to camp in California again this past summer and the boy just got another cell phone; gee, if only grade seven students could learn to stop losing their cell phones.

Meanwhile, your eldest son is finishing up his first year of college and didn’t have to work last summer as you paid his tuition bill. Well, not just tuition, you also picked up the tab for his car payments. But who wouldn’t? After all, he cut the grass at least four times last year.

Times have been good, but not good enough to resist the urge.

You again lose your cool and begin rifling through the drawer for the credit card applications. When you find them, you see they have an old sticky note that reads “ask Betty about her battle with Mastercard”

Betty was a neighbour down the street who has since moved. Since you wrote that note, you learned the full story - she and her husband got a bit too carried away with her credit card debt and the bank ended up foreclosing on their home. They just couldn’t meet their mortgage payments any more.

Concerned by that recollection, you rip up the forms and begin rewriting your household budget.

Sorry junior, no more video games. You’ll just have to get by with the old ones for a while and even wear some of your older brother’s hand-me-downs. The vacation to Mexico will have to wait and the four dinner outs a week will be cut back to just one. Bathroom renovations...postponed. Within minutes you have magically balanced your household budget.

Now all you have to do is share your story with the government. Not including flood costs, its budget expenditures are expected to exceed revenues by about 4.5 per cent this year. After a decade of significant spending increases, try not to chuckle if they tell you they can’t find savings. After all, you just did.