I'm 100% serious, though, and it's not about "I DEMAND THAT YOU FEEL MY SUFFERING" or anything like that. I mean, look.
My budget practices, to this day, are based on a system I developed back when I was living, alone, on minimum wage, back in inflation-infested Boulder, CO.
Back then, it was a matter of fucking raw survival. Today, it's a matter of... well, coming off as being muct more wealthy than I actually ought to be, basically. My income is pretty high on a national scale but around here I'm sort of a higher working-class, and everyone else in my salary range still rents and makes payments on their Camries.
I have no illusions about the fact that, had I not been forced to adapt to fucking eat, I would be every bit as broke today as I was back then. Probably moreso, since I'd be taking a leisurely swim in a bottomless pool of debt.
So demanding that the people in charge of our budget at least experience a little bit of ascetism isn't petty, it's goddam practical. This country's economy has been run into the ground 100% by privileged ignorants who never had any frame of reference for understanding how money works when it's actually practically limited. Most of them aren't even really rich, per se - it's mostly the comfortably middle-class people who have never been poor enough to understand why an underwater mortgage is a fucking bad idea.
If I had my way with society, every man and woman would have to live for a year independently with their wages capped at minimum before they could be considered an adult. It's like young Leonidas killing a wolf, only in this case the vicious predator is Capital One.
Short of that, though, demanding that the lawmakers and macro-economists have at least a working understanding of how people live? I'll settle with that, for now.