> Seems to me even governments make the same choices in many ways - cut back health-care, policing, education, public transport and let the next government deal with the consequences.

Definitely - defund the police was an astonishing rallying cry that made the communities it pretended to help much more dangerous for their residents.

But the opposite is far more likely, and far more destructive long-term: it's easier to buy votes by spending more on social programmes and rack up debt and/or inflation to cover it, and then spend even more to fix that problem for enough voters that the people paying for it all can't vote it away, and the people who vote for it over the decades just don't understand why their pot feels so uncomfortably warm all of a sudden.