Strips

I’ll explain it again, only more completely this time. A pig was revealed to be the one in charge of the countries economics, which explains the mud, in an early comic. Thus the pig is important. The pig is the only one with a luxury of any kind, mainly the stick he uses to play fetch. If the newspapers say to cut luxury items they will. This is part of the joke, newspapers sometimes sensationalize the news to sell papers. So they are cutting the pigs luxury item as the newspaper instructed without actually doing any thinking about how it will help then. Or simply but they are going along with what the paper said ignorant as to the reasoning and will be surprised when it fails to work.