Of Ilaria Bifarini (Bocconiana redeemed)

Repeated exposure to an image or content causes the individual to modify their perception of reality and internalize the message conveyed. It's what psychologists call the "priming effect", and which advertisers and communication experts know very well. The more a message is repeated and emphasized, perhaps through the shape of the commercial, the more familiar it will be.
Thus it can happen that a concept lacks truthfulness, but repeated insistently and convincingly, acquires the rank of truth. This is what happened with the fake economic news of the moment, as absurd as it is apparently effective: the state budget would be like that of a family. Journalists repeat it in unison, television hosts, economists and indifferent people. So do ordinary people, fast in economics and above all in good faith, he internalized a completely misleading thought.
According to this logic, when a country has public debt - therefore normal in a modern economy- she should behave like a good and careful housewife: tighten belts and cut family expenses. As, how a temperate woman will save on food, on clothing and, in conditions of extreme ratio, to health care for themselves, for your spouse and children, so the State should follow his virtuous example.
So, since the “family” of the State is the State itself, that is, all the citizens who live there, its territory and its institutions, the cuts will have repercussions on the entire community. To save money, it must first of all contravene what should be its main function in a civil socio-economic system: protect those who have no protection, who by birth or due to events or particular conditions finds himself in a situation of obvious disadvantage. And here the examples could be endless, from the unemployed to the disabled, to victims of natural disasters.
It could then, with a view to making ends meet, restructuring public healthcare from a profit-oriented market perspective, transforming the patient into a customer. Then continue with the privatization of public services and infrastructure, by having them managed by the market – considered par excellence efficient. Apart from a few small exceptions like what happened in Genoa.
Thus a private school model could be embraced, in which parents will offer their children a level of education closely linked to their income. There would only be the small inconvenience of blocking the social elevator and restoring the wealth.
Since I don't like rhetoric, I'll stop here, but the practical examples to dismantle the absurd comparison between public and family budgets could continue for a long time.
The State is not a family because its objective is the well-being and protection of all citizens, not just his children as family, and operates over a long-term time horizon. It must also guarantee the functioning of the institutions guaranteeing law and democracy.
In the end, as the English say “last but not least”, from an economic and accounting point of view, adopt the conduct of a good housewife, which for a State means adopting austerity, it means firing, making essential public services increasingly expensive, increase the level of poverty, of inequality and unemployment. So it could happen that the same virtuous housewife, due to austerity, has to give up treatment or, really, that her husband loses his job. In fact, there is a direct relationship, quite intuitive, between state cuts and a decrease in private wealth because, to put it in the words of Nobel Prize winner Krugman, “your spending is my income”.
We could therefore, with good reason, reverse the commercial and affirm: “the state budget is the opposite of that of the family”. But we know the prejudices, once sedimented they are difficult to unhinge.