Maybe one way to explain the issues facing this country can be through simplifying the many political and country-wide issues by positing them on a home basis, as if we are talking about our own family’s finances.

On that basis, we start on the basic assumption we are not doing too badly at all. The family members are working and bringing wages home. We can buy whatever we need and many times in a reasonable time too.

However, we have a loan (whether this is a bank home loan or any other loan is immaterial for our purposes). So far, we have managed to service this loan and to keep up with the payments.

However, as the experience of other countries such as Spain or Ireland shows us, if anything unfortunate were to happen, there will be many who do not keep up their loan payments and even a short spell of this will put them beyond the reach of salvation.

The past two years or so have increased the stress on our family as things became more expensive and the cost of living allowance (or COLA) such as it is, failed to keep up with the changing times.

Plus there are certain expenditures which have long been postponed and which have now become rather urgent. A family may, for instance, need to replace the car, or a roof, or even install a PV unit, but these require rather high down payments.

In the case of the country as a whole, one can only read the long list of European Council recommendations in today’s issues to see what a tall shopping list we are faced with.

Now this is where it gets interesting. The present government, elected on an expansionary basis, shirks away from proposing any structural changes and only ‘hopes’ that an increase in the country’s economic tempo, such as a spurt of consumer spending, will produce the growth that in turn will improve the government’s revenues.

To put this on a family basis, it is as if we were to think that working extra hours would give us extra revenue so that we will be able to afford that purchase we have long been wanting to do.

Put like this, this is exactly what many families do. The result, as we all realise, is added stress, and all that increased stress generates – fractiousness, illness too, etc.

It is only those families who manage their finances in a sane way, who realize that it is the financial structure of the family that has got to change, a different lifestyle, pattern of expenditure, etc. Otherwise, the family will find it is working harder than ever but remains in the same situation.

This is precisely what is happening to our country, and we can blame both this government and also its predecessor, which more or less operated on the same basis. We have been working harder and harder and yet the government deficit has increased although we had promised we would bring it down; our debt has increased and increased; and one cannot really say we have improved our competitiveness for we patently have not.

Now we can see this present government hoping against hope that it can increase its revenue through increased economic activity so that it can avoid making hard and difficult choices. The European Council, as one can see in today’s issue, rather questions these assumptions. So do we.

We can look around and we can see that all other member states, even those like The Netherlands which have operated on ‘virtuous’ lines for many years, are forced to face up to hard decisions, whatever the consequences. But we still think we are blessed by the gods and do not need to do so.

We are in for a rude awakening.

A family, a concern, can tell the government it is only through watching carefully expenditure that a family, a concern, can first of all control the expenditure pattern, hence the economic basis, and only through that that resources can be put aside to make the needed purchase.

Any other approach will only increase stress levels and ultimately risk far more than any purchase warrants.