Imagine, if you will, that you are an average Joe American, ready to enter the workforce. Let’s say that you managed to make it through America’s public schools before the Tea Party closed them all, and as such you have an average public school education. Let’s say that you decided to go to college, and you graduated after five years with a bachelor’s degree in business, and you begin your new life with a modest $25,000 in school loans and maybe $2,000 on your credit card. You were lucky enough to find a job, and you’re now employed in lower-middle management, with a starting salary of $32,000 per year.

Of course, you’re on your own now, so you find an apartment, and you buy some furniture. Your college car was a hand-me-down that started as your parents’ car, but it runs, and for now you decide to keep it. Because you’re thrifty and you care about money, you begin to immediately put a portion of your paycheck into your 401(k).

And let’s say, hypothetically, that it is at this point that the TEA Party is given the task of running your life in the same way that they wish to run the United States Government. Well, okay, you’re a good American citizen, and so you decide to go along for the ride. You recognize that some changes are going to have to be made, but it’s for the good of the country and for your own personal well-being.

Your next paycheck arrives, and you notice that it’s larger than it has been in the past. As you look it over, you recognize that your federal and state taxes have declined, and your Social Security contributions have disappeared entirely. You begin to think this whole TEA party thing was a good idea. You’ll be able to use those extra savings to purchase a gun on an installment plan.

Once you buy your gun, you decide to spend some of your extra money for yourself. You replace your parents’ old car with a shiny new one, and agree to make payments on it for the next few years. You’re still within your budget (though it’s a little tighter, with car payments), so you figure you’ll be fine. Life is grand.

A year passes. Your landlord tells you that in order to keep up with the times, he has to raise your rent by $50 a month. You like your apartment, so you agree. At work, you come up for your annual review at your company. Your boss tells you that your performance has been outstanding, and as a result you get to make the same $32,000 this year that you did last year. You had hoped for a bit of a raise, but your boss reminds you that the TEA Party runs your life now as it would the government. As the government is not allowed to bring in additional revenue through taxes, you are not allowed to bring in additional revenue, either. You understand completely, and you think your budget will take it. Upon further review, once you buy another gun you’re going to come up a little short, so you do what any good TEA Party member would do — you cut spending. You have a favorite restaurant just down the street, and you take a lot of your meals there, but you decide you can eat out only once a week and brown-bag your lunch instead of eating in the cafeteria where you work.

Another year passes. Your landlord says he only has to up your rent $25 a month this year, though he hates to do it. You still like your aparment, so you pay. At work you were once again a consummate professional, so you get to keep your same salary for another year. The car you bought is rear-ended in the parking lot, so you have to pay $500 out of pocket for your insurance deductible, but once you’re done paying for another gun, you should be able to work that off your credit card.

Now five years have gone by. You still make $32,000 per year, but you’ve managed to pay off your car, so now you can concentrate on getting your school loans paid off once and for all. You own five guns. Best of all, bless your heart, in the time that has passed you’ve fallen in love with Jane American. After each of you has removed all contributions to your 401(k) plans and avoided dining out altogether, you are able to save enough to get married and buy a house. You’d like to redecorate the house — one of you wants a man-cave, and another wants a master bathroom that feels like an oasis, so you immediately borrow back the equity of your house in order to make those changes. Unfortunately, you go a little over budget, but you put that on your credit cards, figuring your combined income will pay those off eventually.

You begin to recognize that you’re not saving as much money as you thought. True, you’re not paying rent, but you are paying heat and water and other utilities that you never had to pay as a renter. You’ve purchased a snow-blower (you live in the north) for winter and a riding lawnmower for summer. Times are a little tighter than you anticipated, and your debt load is rising, so you decide to get the basic cable package, and not the extended one, and certainly not any of the premium channels. At least your work has been going well, and you are able to continue to keep your $32,000 salary. A little bit more of it is spent at Wal-mart than at finer department stores, but you have each other, and you’re happy.

Soon enough, the two you discover that you are expecting. You’re going to need a nursery, or at least a crib and a changing table and some bright paint on the walls. You’re going to need diapers, and bottles, and baby wipes, and you’ll be going to the doctor a lot more often. When you are over for dinner at their house, your in-laws ask if you’re okay financially, and you tell them that you’re thinking of applying for a second job.

Immediately, your father-in-law takes you into the den and closes the door. He is visibly upset, and he reminds you that if you take a second job, that will raise your revenue — that is not allowed under the rules that you agreed to when you let the TEA Party take over your life, and he’s not going to have his pregnant daughter married to some rule-breaker. You think quickly on your feet, and you assure him you were making a joke. Though you haven’t contributed to your 401(k) in some time, there is money in it, and if you cash that out you’ll be able to make the nursery and have a little left over.

Ah, family! Joe American, Junior entered your world shortly thereafter, followed about two years later by little Jenny. You love them both, though Joe Junior is prone to ear infections. You have health insurance through your employer, of course, but the family rate is more expensive than the individual one, and you’ve had to raise your deductible in order to afford it. Since there is no way to raise new revenue, you and Jane decided to get rid of television entirely, and the internet along with it. No one was watching TV while taking care of infant children, and you can go online at the library or at work, if you need to. Your credit card is maxed out, but it’s okay, because Jane got a pre-approved offer in the mail the other day, so you should be able to get another one.

Before you turn around, Joe Junior is five, but you’ve managed to pay off your school loans. That’s fortunate, because now that the TEA Party has done away with the public school system, you’ll need that money in order to send little Joe to private school. Of course, that costs a bit more than what your school loan payment was, so you’ll have to cut spending. After you and Jane talk about it, you decide to sell your car, but then Jane’s father passes away and leaves you a little money. Since there’s no inheritance tax, you figure that it’s enough to keep Joe Junior in school and little Jenny in daycare and then school for the next six years.

Turns out you miscalculated, though, because after five years you’ve run out of Jane’s dad’s money. Your car isn’t worth nearly what it was five years ago — in fact, you’d been thinking of getting a new one, but you really can’t afford it. Still, school is important to you. You sell the car and buy a bike. You refinance the house. You decide the kids would be healthier if the whole family went vegetarian, since meat is so expensive.

And that works. Well, it works for another two years. Now Joe Junior is 12 and little Jenny is 10. Your house is mortgaged to the hilt (though it’s well-stocked with guns), your credit cards are maxed out; you hate to say it, but you lie awake at night wondering if any of your three remaining parents are going to die soon. You need more spending cuts, but you’re not sure where to get them. You already keep the thermostat at 60 degrees in the winter, and you never run the air-conditioning any more. You’ve turned down the water-heater temperature. You suppose you could sell Jane’s car, too, but you’re probably not going to get much for it, and you really need at least one car in the family.

Ultimately, you and Jane decide that you have to make the tough choices. When you get right down to it, education is an entitlement program. You’re not completely prepared to give up on Joe Junior, since he’s further along, but you decide that Jenny can no longer go to school. She’s 10 — that’s old enough to work. It never would have flown when you were a kid, but child labor has become fairly common again, now that there are no government agencies to regulate business. You figure Jenny’s income should maybe be enough to pay for Joe Junior’s schooling. By the time Joe Junior is done with school, you’ll be able to marry Jenny off to someone — he’ll have a job and she’ll be a wife, and you won’t have to pay for either of them any more.

Luckily for you, that’s exactly how it works out. Jenny gets a job in a new manufacturing plant, working on an assembly line to make computer chips. It’s a good job, and she makes almost $4 an hour. You remember a time, of course, when minimum wage was higher, but it had to be cut in order to be fair to Big Business. Still, that $160 each week really helps out the family. You are able to keep paying your mortgage and your bills, and you can make the minimum payments on all of your outstanding credit card debt. Joe Junior graduates from high school and takes a job at a fast-food restaurant, and Jenny marries a foreman in her company who had actually made it all the way through college.

Now it’s your golden years. You and Jane are empty-nesters, which helps a lot, because you can finally take some of the money you were using for Joe’s schooling and begin to use it to pay down the $60,000 of credit card debt you’ve managed to accumulate. It’s far easier to cut spending when you don’t have kids, and Joe Junior is kind enough to stop off most nights with leftover fast-food that the restaurant was going to have to throw away. That means you’re no longer a vegetarian, but the food is free, so you’re not complaining. Jenny gets pregnant her second year of marriage, so you spend a little money to help her get settled. Still, you’ve lived almost 25 years with no increase in revenue, just as the TEA Party wanted you to do.

It’s a little sad when Jane gets breast cancer, though. You have insurance, thank goodness, and it’s cheaper now that the kids aren’t on it. You burn through your deductible pretty quickly, and then you only have to pay 40% of each of the doctor bills. Unfortunately for your financial health, she’s going to need to chemotherapy. Even paying 40%, there’s no way you can afford that.

To hell with it, you think — you’re going to take a second job, you’re going to raise revenue and the consequences be damned. But Jane calms you down, reminds you of the code you have both pledged to live by — if the government can get by with no new taxes, then the two of you just have to get by with no new revenue, either. Life maybe hadn’t turned out the way you wanted it to, but you at least lived by the code you had agreed upon. Jane calmly tells the doctor that she won’t be treating the disease.

You are 52 years old when Jane dies. She had the employee life insurance plan, so her death left you with enough to take care of the funeral expenses and to pay off your credit card debt. You still have 14 years left to pay on your last refinance, but you might be able to do that on your $32,000 salary as long as Joe Junior continues to bring you food. There will be no inheritance — your parents were in a nursing home, but were kicked out when they were out of money. Now they are cared for by a Christian organization, for which you are thankful. Jane’s mom remarried, and now that Jane is gone she’s changed her will; Joe Junior and Jenny might get a little help someday, but you’re not in the will.

At 60, you are forced into retirement when your company decides to replace you with a new kid fresh out of high school that has agreed to work for only $16,000 per year. Since you still haven’t paid off your house, you are forced to sell it, though it needs repair and doesn’t bring as much as you wanted. You get a small apartment — sort of like when you were just starting out — and you get a new job for almost $3 an hour, working second shift as a security guard.

Your money finally runs out when you are 67, and there are tense times in your family before you agree to move in with Jenny and her three boys. You begin to wonder if it might have been better to keep having Social Security taken out of your paycheck each week, because you sure would like some now — if nothing else, it would pay Jenny for the burden she’s taken on.

Actually, you’re only there for a month. You haven’t gone to the doctor since Jane died — you couldn’t really afford it — so you didn’t know that you had hypertension and heart trouble, but you found out about that in a real big hurry when you had massive chest pains while eating breakfast one morning. One of Jenny’s boys — you think it was Jasper — called 911, and the ambulance arrives only 45 minutes later. By then, of course, it’s too late for you. You die face down in a bowl of cold cereal, but like Jane has said before you — at least you lived by the code you had agreed on. You’ve lived the TEA Party American Dream.

(This post previously published at the author's blog, www.bangthebuckets.com)