Jon Ossoff’s campaign to represent Georgia’s sixth congressional district was run on the assumption that an anti-Trump message combined with one about fiscal responsibility could win, appealing to the better impulses of people outraged by Donald Trump but who nonetheless support reining in wasteful spending.

One of Ossoff’s more well-circulated ads (entitled “Table”) found him sitting alone at a kitchen table, aping a line from Margaret Thatcher to bemoan how “both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money.” In the folksy imagery and call to reduce the deficit, he invoked a trope that’s been circulated for years by pollster Frank Luntz and other right-wing goons to justify painful spending cuts: if hard-working American families have to make tough choices about their finances, then why doesn’t Washington?

The line — as several economists have pointed out — is nonsense. Households do not have the power to set interest rates and print money; the US government does. But from a political perspective, the logic is even more troublingly misguided. That “fiscal responsibility” is a popular, common-sense stance widespread among voters is a prevailing myth of neoliberal economics, and one now embraced across party lines.