Whenever Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, or for that matter any government, tries to restrain public spending, the impacts of the cuts it makes are always personalized by those who want to maintain the status quo.

Thus, “children will starve” or “people will die” if our current unsustainable levels of spending, deficits and debt are not maintained, they claim.

But what is never personalized is the negative impact of debt on the public and on public services.

This point was made recently by Tony Chapman, a Newstalk1010 commentator and successful entrepreneur.

He asked why people aren’t demonstrating in the streets over the countless examples of government waste and inefficiency that contribute to unsustainable debt.

The great American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell also addresses this issue in his seminal book, The Vision of the Anointed, Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

“When the government creates some new program, nothing is easier than to show whatever benefits that program produces,” Sowell writes. “Indeed, those who run the program will be more than cooperative in bringing those benefits to the attention of the media.”

But what these programs are never weighed against, Sowell warns, is the question of whether the taxpayers’ money it cost to finance them could have been better spent elsewhere, on different programs, or used to lower taxes, or to pay down debt.

Combine this with the fact “the built-in bias of the media is to show what happens right under our noses, with little or no regard to what that has cost elsewhere,” Sowell writes, and it creates a perpetual demand for more government services, higher costs and more debt.

To put what Chapman and Sowell are talking about in concrete terms, consider that the legacy of 15 years of Liberal rule in Ontario is a $10.3 billion deficit this year, a $360 billion debt and annual interest payments on debt of $13.3 billion.

Imagine how much health care, education and community services could be improved if Ontario had $13.3 billion more annually to spend on public services, instead of paying interest on debt, which doesn’t even lower the debt.

To be sure, some debt is productive, the same way it can be productive for a family to use debt wisely to purchase a house.

But what the Liberals also did after inheriting a reasonable debt-to-GDP ratio of 27.2% from the previous Progressive Conservative government in 2003, was to raise it to an unhealthy 40.2% by the time they lost power last year. (Many experts consider debt-to-GDP ratio a more accurate indicator of a government’s financial health than debt.)

Of course, no one will ever demonstrate in the streets about that, which has resulted in our current reality of high debt, high taxes and public services under siege.

No one ever protests about that. But we should.