You and I might be in agreement on some of this. I’m afraid we draw opposite political conclusions.
If you want to continue discussion, I’d ask you first to give a clear, correct and unequivocal answer to the question I raised upthread:
Go ahead! Be the very first conservative here to cope with facts! It won’t hurt.
If you’re willing to answer that question, then, to save a round in the dialog, indicate whether you understand the huge deficits of 2009-2011 were appropriate (however misguided the details may have been) to save us from the biggest business confidence crisis in more than 70 years.
If you can do that much, then we can discuss on-going political considerations.
So you want government to do more things, but you don’t want the part of the government that does those things to get any bigger? Everybody wants government to do some things and not others. Everybody thinks that their priorities are legitimate areas for government to take action. Nobody wants government to spend money just for the sake of spending it.
It’s easier to talk in specifics. Many people, largely under the heading of “conservatives”, want the federal government to do more to stop illegal immigration. They want a bigger border fence, or more agents patrolling the border, or more inspectors verifying right-to-work documents at their employers. None of that is going to happen for free. Calling themselves “fiscally conservative” would be bullshit, because they’re willing to sacrifice fiscal responsibility in favor of something they consider to be a higher priority. If they want to call themselves “anti illegal immigration conservatives” then that’s fine.
Several years ago, computer companies started calling themselves “solution providers”, which was also bullshit. Every company in the world is a solution provider. If your clothes are dirty, Microsoft can’t “provide” a “solution”, go to a laundromat. They did it to sound important and popular; appealing to everyone to solve all of their problems. “Fiscally conservative”, as you define it, is about the same; generic enough to sound good but empty of any real meaning.
Robot Arm, the idea that Rand Rover is trying to get across is that in his book “Fiscal Conservative” means that one has a fixed set of things the government is allowed to do, while a “Fiscal Liberal” has a fixed set of priorities that may be justifiably advanced by government intervention in any arbitrary area. By which standards there are very few true examples of either type out there, and probably more fiscal conservatives than liberals.
I don’t think his definition is necessarily correct, but he’s been arguing it here for ages. Personally I think the general populace DOES take “Fiscal Conservative” to mean “prefers to spend as little as possible, avoiding deficits where practical” whereas “Fiscal Liberal” means “willing to spend as much as necessary, avoiding deficits as convenient”.
By which standards, of course, Clinton was a moderate and Bush Jr. was a Fiscal Liberal, which idea tends to twist some panties (but not typically Rand’s, since I understand he’s not exactly a Bush fanboy).
I don’t consider myself a fiscal conservative (although I am, compared to the current GOP, who are in favor of continued massive deficits.) But I would support an increase in immigration control, paid for by stopping the war on drugs. Repurposing drug agents as immigration agents may not be an exact fit but it’s as close as you’ll reasonably get when you’re looking at thousands of layoffs (or more!) in the prison-industrial complex.
1: of or relating to taxation, public revenues, or public debt <fiscal policy>
2: of or relating to financial matters
If that is Rand’s point, it’s meaningless. Just saying that you have a list of what’s permitted or desired for the government to engage in is pointless. Everybody has such a list. What matters is what’s on the list.
But if we somehow accept that position, calling it “fiscally conservative” is bullshit, since the mere existence, or not, of such a list has nothing to do with government revenue or expenses.
It sounds great, though. I’m sure you could get lots of people to hop on the “fiscally conservative” bandwagon and vote you into office, and then spend the country into the poorhouse giving them what they ask for.
OK, let’s talk specifics. I think the fiscally conservative position on whether to increase enforcement of the rules against illegal immigration is complete silence. That’s not an issue that fiscal conservatism addresses. It’s like asking what the American Medical Association’s position is on coke v. Pepsi.
A better example (recently discussed in another thread) is paid parental leave. I’ll copy my post from that thread over here in a bit.
Is that because enforcement does not need to change, because government should be out of it entirely, or is it simply outside the bounds of what fiscally conservative though addresses? Is there a fiscally conservative position on how much money the government should spend on border enforcement?
By what rule is it decided which issues fiscal conservatism addresses, and which ones it ignores? When something new comes up, like net neutrality, how does fiscal conservatism know whether to be pro, anti, or to ignore it altogether?
Fiscal Liberal (alternative spelling Fiscal Librul) appears to be what Fiscal Conservatives call the other side. I have never heard anyone self-identify themselves a fiscal liberal (but maybe just not in my circles).
I think it’s pretty meaningless to divide the world into fiscal conservatives and fiscal liberals based on the above definitions.
Well, just by the rule of what the subject matter of the theory is about. If you ask a weatherman about how to structure a merger of two corporations so that it’s tax-free, what do you think he’ll say? I would guess he’d say “look buddy, you need to call a tax lawyer.” That’s the same thing I’m saying here–“you need to consult other ideas for that issue.” Fiscal conservatism isn’t some mystical theory of everything–it’s only about certain things.
I think net neutrality is an issue that is easily handled by fiscal conservatism.
Here’s that post from the other thread I discussed earlier:
Bottom line, how long do you think it REALLY took the rich merchants to just avoid Sherwood Forest altogether and take their business elsewhere? Of COURSE, it’s all about minimizing the hit to ME. If the price for me to live in this society is to give up everything I want so others can have it for doing nothing to earn it, then it won’t take me long to pack up what I have left and move elsewhere.
When the rich guy walks out of the restaurant with his checkbook, who’s gonna pay for the meal that the rest of you ate up?
To answer your question: Yes, but. You can’t simply point to an economic time, point to the President and assign him all of the blame/praise. Clinton, for example, had a projection of rising deficits in the late 90s. It was a combination of a new GOP congress and a booming technology sector that caused the budget to come near balance. So does he get praise? Sure. Was it all him? No.
With Reagan the same thing. Were the deficits his fault, the Dem House’s fault, or a necessity because of the cold war?
The only way you could accurately compare all of the Presidents is if they faced the same policy decisions.
To answer question #2: Yes. Huge deficits were absolutely necessary these past couple of years. I don’t think that they needed to be AS large as they were, but they definitely would exist, just like deficits exist in your personal budget when tough times arise.
But Obama’s best estimates have trillion dollar plus deficits at the end of this decade after the recovery. That is not acceptable. I don’t care what Bush, Reagan, or Clinton did. It is fiscally irresponsible to propose such financial management. If any private person or business did that, they would be universally scorned.
Balanced, of course, against the fact that (lacking the US’s trained labor base and specialized infrastructure, not to mention our gigantic market) the rich guy’s profits are significantly lower and his overheads higher anywhere else, unless he’s making absolute bottom of the barrel stuff. Or didn’t you notice that textiles and plastic junk tend to move to 3rd-World countries, but largely speaking, microprocessors and cars do not, regardless of corporate/upper-bracket taxes.
Fortunately, most rich people are smarter than you, and merely try to sneak some of their money into overseas tax shelters instead of leaving outright when the chips are down
Here, let me break it down into caveman speak for you: “Small government good, big government bad.” The government involving itself in new areas with programs that would be hard to do away with are bad. A temporary increase in spending in an area the government is already involved in to handle a short-term problem is OK.
So if there is a new long term problem that is handled better by pooling resources on a large scale, you’d still rather have it handled on a local level? Even when the individual solutions don’t scale?
You are introducing a key restraint into the problem that Rand Over didn’t mention. Scaling is a key issue but it is usually best handled locally rather than nationally for the vast majority of issues. Constitutional rights, national defense, monetary policy, and similar issues can be handled nationally but probably not most other things. There is also different levels of ‘local.’ The individual states would be the key ones but it could be by city or district. Each has their place. Scaling up to a level beyond what is needed to handle localized problems introduces bureaucratic inefficiencies and lack of institutional awareness to the individual problems at hand.
So if some state decides to save some money by making the lanes on their highways ten feet wide, you think it’s more efficient to do that at the state level? How 'bout food inspections, think we’re better off having 50 labs setting 50 different standards for the allowable level of e. coli, rather than just one?
Yeah, I get that part of your message, I really do. The federal government should leave most issues alone, except for those things that are important enough to justify taking the money by force.
Which still evades the essential question, what things are important enough?
