What you're proposing is that we cut our food and medical care for the working poor and the elderly, while completely ignoring the fact that the rich guy we rented a room out to last year, is barely paying enough rent to cover his food and electricity. The first thing I'm going to do is to raise his rent so that we are at least getting our expenses related to his tenancy.
Most of our household spending is locked in, somewhat akin to the costs for food stamps and Medicare. We cannot reduce our costs for housing, utilities, gas, car insurance, or food (unless we throw our daughter out). We deliberately live well below our means because everytime there is a downturn in the economy, my husband gets laid off. At that point, we stop going out to dinner, spend vacations at home, and stop any form of discretionary spending, but we cannot ignore obligations to our family - food, shelter and medical care.
If we run short, say the car breaks down, we're going to have to put it on our line of credit until DH is back to work. If he's out of work for a long time (like over 6 months) and we max out our line of credit, it may be necessary to re-finance the house, although my income when I was working was sufficient that we would be fine, if we were careful and any fiscal surprises were small. We never had to do that but the line of credit came in handy more than once.
It was absolute lunacy to rent the room to this guy so cheap but he gave us some story about all that he could contribute to the household. Since he's currently costing us more than he's paying, we're not going to carry this guy any longer. The United States shouldn't be carrying the wealthy either. Time to raise their rent so at least the taxpayers aren't subsidizing their profits.
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