It goes without saying that most liberals don’t fully understand what motivates conservatives, and vice versa.
But liberals generally have a pretty good idea of what conservatives want, even if we don’t fully grasp the why. Many conservatives, OTOH, seem to believe that what liberals want is the mirror image of what they want.
For instance, many conservatives who are antiabortion clearly believe that liberals want lots of abortions. (See #31.) Why would we want that?
Rather, we’d want a world where women are never forced or coerced into sex, and have a full range of birth control options freely available to them (#33 is correct, at least) that they are fully educated about and are not coerced from using, so that unwanted pregnancies are vanishingly rare, and abortion is safe and legal, but as a result of the preceding, rare.
The other thing about liberalism is that it’s largely about addressing things that we see as problems. Climate change is a problem. Too many people and too few jobs, and too many jobs with wages that one can’t live on, are a problem. A relative handful of multibillionaires having an incredibly outsized voice in our political discourse, diminishing the impact of everyone else, is a problem. We want certain things, not in and of themselves, but because we want to solve these problems.
There are two options that you are 100% correct about - unfettered control by conservatives would ensure #30 would happen, and unfettered control by liberals would bring about #18.
This would never happen. A majority of young conservatives support equal rights for gays, albeit a much smaller majority than the overwhelming support from young liberals.
Unless the conservativerse’s top priority is keeping hateful old people alive forever there’s no way gay marriage remains an issue for the next 20 years.
I’m amused by the tension between 5, 6, and 1 on the conservative list. How are you going to pay off the debt with a low flat tax, and an economy crippled by the sort of drop in the ability of people to spend that an abandonment of the minimum wage would bring on? (Domestic consumer spending accounts for about 2/3 of our economy, IIRC.)
These are caricatures of what liberals and conservatives want. I’m as lefty as they get, but I can’t get behind 1,2,7,9,12,18,19, and 30. And what makes you think liberals want a GDP of $25 T and conservatives want $40 T? Do you think liberals sit around saying “dammit, the GDP is getting too big!”?
On the conservative side, what is wanted depends on what kind of conservative you are. There are the business types, who care only about low taxes on the rich and as few regulations as possible. There are the social conservatives who worry about abortion and guns. There are the hawks who care only about military might and think Israel is infallible. Then there are the bigots, who hate gays, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, women,… Each of these groups will pay lip service to the others in order to keep that fragile coalition together. None of these groups wants everything on the list.
I’m rather liberal, but the only ones I might possibly support on that list are 1, 6, 9, 13, 17, 23-25, 29, 30, and 33. Most of the rest I would strongly oppose.
I don’t think you fully understand what liberals want.
Paying off the deficit would probably require less than a trillion a year if we do it over twenty years (Although I’m just guessing, I didn’t run any math). It might still be possible to cut taxes somewhat if the federal budget is cut enough. As for the minimum wage, only 1.532 million workers actually earn the minimum wage. In addition, the evidence I’ve seen indicates that equilibrium wages are around $5 an hour, which isn’t substantially below minimum wage. And even though minimum wage workers spend nearly all of their money as soon as they get it, they still represent a small fraction of spending because they have so much less to begin with. I’m not necessarily supporting abolishing the minimum wage, but getting rid of it won’t lead to some Mad-Max apocalypse where survivors battle it out for the last can of Smeat (as Der Trihs predicted upthread).
On the other hand, I think a balanced budget amendment would have the effects Measure for Measure predicted, namely an inability to enact timely monetary policy, leading to longer recessions and more unsustainable periods of growth.
My calculator says it’s 31% below minimum wage. We clearly have different definitions of ‘substantial.’
The minimum wage isn’t just about people who are earning the minimum wage. It has a ripple effect - if you’ve got people working for you at minimum wage, and you also have some jobs that require more skills or are more difficult or less desirable in other ways, you’ve got to pay them at least a little more than minimum. And then there’s going to be jobs that are a little bit more difficult or require greater skills than those. So if you get rid of the minimum wage, and the effective minimum falls to the $5 equilibrium, those $8 and $9/hour jobs fall to $5.50 and $6.25, and so forth, with the upshot that tens of millions of people at the lower end of the economy earn thousands less each year.
I agree with you there, but the effect wouldn’t be trivial, as best as I can tell.
Me too. Conservatives are far less likely to be pro-NASA than liberals. Older conservatives are the ones who embrace the idea that the moon landing was a hoax, and those of us who are younger generally consider it a waste of money.
