Controlling the Analogy is 80% of winning the argument. This is being done with the Deficit fight. The current analogy being pushed by Republicans (and brain-dead Pundits) is the Income/Expense analogy. We have to cut our expenses because we are spending too much of our income.
A better analogy is something like a home business where everyone in the house makes and sells their output. For example:
You live in a family where everyone makes wooden boxes. Recently, due to an incident of the Flu most of the family got sick and could not work on making boxes. Our income went down, even through we could sell every box we make.
With such an analogy the rational response is to spend our income to buy medicine so those that are sick get well and can make boxes and to purchase additional tools so we can make more boxes. Keeping members of our family productive and giving them the tools to make boxes increases our income and erases the money we spent on medicine and tools.
Equating our deficit problems to a fixed income/fixed expenses is mis-characterizing the analogy. We need to push the small-business analogy and not the family-income analogy.