Liberals would like to lower Government spending. Just as soon as everything has been taken care of.
To be fair, Liberals feel the government can do more good, and that costs more. Since conservatives believe the government does best when it does the least I think that’s a fair foundation for criticism when they’re asked to contribute financially.
That said, current fiscal conservatism in government just means spending a lot of money on things conservatives like, not less money on everything.
Every year the population increases, and the value of the dollar decreases. The federal government, just like the nation itself, must grow, and spend more money, in order to even maintain status quo.
Because a budget increases, that does not mean that the government has actually grown. The measure of whether or not the government has grown is not dollars spent, but percentage of GDP.
Budget freezes are essentially budget cuts, because of the expansion of the nation and the lowering value of the dollar. Actual budget cuts are more dramatic, they are shrinking a budget during the expansion of the number of people that budget is being spent to serve.
Interestingly, the federal debt becomes less of a problem because the amount borrowed is the amount that must be paid back, and the dollar is worth less tomorrow than it is today. As such, borrowing is more useful to us than breaking the budget to pay it all back today.
These are facts. Another fact is that when the federal minimum wage stagnates, but the prices of everything else go up, the poorest among us become even poorer, because their dollar buys less every year.
If you are a liberal, you understand these facts, and if you were to submit a budget to the Fed, your budget would reflect modest increases to maintain status quo, and you’d borrow strategically at very low interest rates to keep the economy going, as long as debt-to-GDP ratio does not explode, and the country is still growing, you’re still fine.
If you are a fiscal conservative, then your head was spinning at how awful the Bush administration was (cue canned laughter) at handling the economy and are astounded that half of what Obama is being blamed for (expansion of debt under Obama) is still a result of what Republicans did during the Bush years. There are charts and everything which explain this. Wars and tax cuts account for most of the current deficit and almost all of the additional debt since Obama took office.
If we were not spending on wars and if the tax cuts were allowed to expire, where would our deficit be? This is not just Blame Bush. Math is not the same as empty rhetoric. If you stop all war expenditure and return tax rates to Clinton Era, where is our deficit, and what happens to the debt?
An actual “fiscal” conservative would understand this. But we have young libertarians who have read Ayn Rand and the Bible and little else (hilariously ironic, given Rand’s views…) and they think they know what the problem is, and how to fix it. Why, you just stop writing checks to those poor people who have paid into the system their whole lives with a promise to be taken care of when they got sick or old!
That way we will have more money to give tax refunds to billionaires, and that will magically stimulate the economy. Because the reason the economy is not recovering faster, put simply, is that the richest among us (who have become fabulously richer under both Bush and Obama) don’t have enough money. They need more, otherwise the economy go boom-boom. Because in my simple libertarian dream world, giving even more tax breaks to billionaires is the only way to solve our problems. Stop giving grandma her arthritis medication, slash government funding that employs, houses, feeds, and clothes millions of people, and make sure bank CEOs have to pay less in taxes on those bonuses that they earn automatically even when the economy is tanking and the bank is failing and its their fault.
And we couldn’t possibly raise the minimum wage because that would crash the economy. Nevermind poor people (who typically spend close to every dollar they earn) pumping that cash directly back into local economies, restaurants, retailers, auto shops, tipping the delivery guy… those poor small businesses can’t afford it. Boo-hoo. Remember what happened the last time the federal minimum wage increased. Nobody was ever employed ever again, and McDonald’s went out of business instead of, you know, getting even bigger.
Because I’m a "fiscal conservative’ and I talk about things I could never freaking comprehend like I’m a danged expert, and I am afraid of mathematics, and on top of all that, I’m a partisan hack and a total hypocrite. Yes indeed, for the purposes of this post, I’m every fiscal conservative I’ve ever met.
No grasp of anything remotely fiscal, and conserving absolutely nothing.
Now that’s psychological projection in action! You’ve pretty much described a central part of the American right wing worldview, while attributing it to the left. Positively Freudian.
“Do Conservatives Understand That Liberals Don’t Really Like Government Spending?”
Do Liberals understand that Conservatives are not going to believe Liberals do not really like government spending until Liberals stop demanding that government do more and more of it?
52% of “non-mandatory”(*) Federal spending is for Dept. of Defense. Which Party do you think most supports rises in DoD spending? Which most supports cuts?
When come back, bring knowledge.
(* - Admittedly, the distinction between mandatory and non-mandatory spending is not clearcut. For example, most of the Veteran Affair budget is include in non-mandatory, non-defense.)
Really? Because conservatives are the ones who volunteer for the armed forces. When we go to war; it’s us doing the warring. When we are in power, we try to benefit everyone and the comparison of state economies shows who does it best. conservatives have many faults as humans. But it’s the left which constantly projects its own ills onto us - which cannot see us as fully human. Libertarians and conservatives may disagree about abortion, but both agree that we don’t want government telling us where to live, what to do, and what we must say and agree with; Liberals increasingly do and are proud of it. It’s not conservatives and Libertarians nodding our heads when Bloomberg mandates what size cola you can get, or when Obama orders the deaths of another hundred foreigners.
I cannot count how many disgusting so-called “scientific studies,” always from some hyper-liberal university, paints another picture of how conservativism is mental illness, fascistic personalities, unevolved worldviews - and modern-day liberalism inevitably the well-balanced and fully-developed personality.
You want to know what the real difference between a conservative and a Liberal is? If a conservative hates you - truly hates you, he’ll look you in the eye and kill you dead. Then he’ll say he’s glad you’re dead 'cuz you were a mean cuss and deserved it. A liberal will stab you in the back and tell everyone that he didn’t do it, and that it was surely for your own good, simply because it’s convenient for him at the moment.
It’s amazing how the massive liberal programs are “mandatory”, ain’t it? Kinda funny how that happens to be the case
But let’s go back to your previus assertion, that conservatives were just too damn stupid to see and consider the real world, and should gratefully accept that their smart, deep-thinking betters were there to pat them on the head and do their thinking for them.
In the end, there is only white and black- but we prefer to call them Good and Evil. Its the moral duty of everyone on this earth to separate the two, and kick the living shit out of the latter. And it’s precisely that liberals have completely forgotten this in favor of power that they’ve become ineffective and vile - and made the world as grey as it can be, because it’s a lot easier to shrug and do whatever you please when the world is a big mishmash of grey. But the moral thing to do? That’s the go out and scrub and scrub and scrub untl your hands bleed. Because that’s what the world needs, and no amount of hand-wringing or self-congratulatory political bullshit will do anything about it. Doing good and being good ought to be enough for you.
So no, we don’t think you like government spending - you love it. Because with it, you buy votess and build massive blocs of powerful allies who catapult you into office, as long as you keep the rivers of money flowing. You want to jack those taxes into the stratosphere not because it gives you the jollies, but because buying votes gives you authority to remake the world as you please, or at least to imagine that you’re doing so. And you’ll do so and call it good no matter how bad things get (and any evidence to the contrary is either nefarious conservative lies or the result of even more nefarious conservative deeds), because - because the world is, after all, just shades of grey. And who’s to say what the truth is?
Nobody. Except those pesky conservatives who can be ridiculed for daring to speak out.
But eventually the coalition break sdown, because eventually you run out of other people’s money or your mad attempts to reshape the world in your preferred image become too absurd. Then comes the flailing and blamethrowing (i.e., the budgetary impossibilities currently favored by Congressional Democrats). Then sometimes after that comes the internal civil war (i.e., California). If you manage to get past those intact, then comes to slow collapse (Illinois).
Septimus: You are off point. To be on point, the OP’s query would have to have read: Do conservatives understand that liberals don’t really like government spending on defense? To which I would have responded: of course they do, doesn’t everyone understand that?
You say this as if you’ve made a point. What, are we supposed to think it should be less than 52%? Running militaries is what governments were invented to do.
i think everyone left and right would like to see each dollar spent to its maximum potential. i think the left takes a “we’re all in this together” approach, and the right takes an “every man for himself” approach. if you generalize the right as well off/rich and the left as not so well off/poor, i can see why each side adopts that worldview. the right works hard for their money, and does not want to see those who don’t siphon off their efforts. the left works hard for their money, and would like to see a percentage of it go into a pot that all can tap into and benefit from. this is of course ultra-simplistic on my part.
As a conservative, I do get that liberals are spending money to further their social goals, not spending as a goal itself. I do disagree with it but I do understand it.
What a fascinating post. Thanks for that–it really gives an insight into the conservative mindset.
There are layers of ignorance, misinformation and unfounded rage intermeshing like an intricate clockwork device here.
21st century conservatism is, so far in this century at least, founded on a bunch of misinformation that drives people to rage, like in the post above. The trouble is, that the rage is generated by phantoms, but directed at real world programs and necessary things that hurt the proper functioning of a government.
21st century conservatives aren’t the villains, they’re the victims of a media that preys on their gullibility and incenses them into action that hurts everyone except the controllers of said media.
I like how his comments that you can’t argue with conservatives because they create unrealistic fantasies and then debate with them instead of with real people went right over your head.
Besides, liberals oppose slavery. If it weren’t for liberals the south wouldn’t have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century at the point of a gun.
I think both sides believe they are born to rule. But the right has more certainty in their opinions. The left can quote science and morals to justify their beliefs and why they should rule, but the right likes to quote sources of unquestioned authority which they claim are on their side (the constitution, the founding fathers, god, etc) and seem to have a more black/white sense of purpose about things.
In general, “Conservatives”, who want to spend incomprehensible amounts of tax dollars on Defense, absolutely do not understand what you speak of.
Quite a rant. Any cites to back up all those bald-faced assertions?
What makes you say these things? What do you think those “incomprehensible amounts” are? How do you know what conservatives do or do not understand?
It wasn’t a rant. It was an explanation of Bandit’s rant.
Conservatives believing misinformation needs a cite? Global warming, legitimate rape, the number of small business owners in the top 1%, the US having the best healthcare in the world, the founding fathers wanted a Christian country, death panels, birthers, FEMA concentration camps, Obama is a socialist, Obama is pushing Sharia law, Obama is hiding his school records, Obama lost his law license, Obama spent two million on hiding his records, Obama traveled on an Indonesian passport, Obama’s mom did porn, Obama is responsible for sequestration, the Senate Dems don’t have a plan to end sequestration, ACORN, the New Black Panthers, and I’m tired of listing stupid fucking nonsense that American conservatives believe in large numbers.
The difference is, some American liberals believe all sorts of stupid stuff too, but they aren’t producing policy to satisfy the nuts on their side.
You’re kidding, right? Sounds to me like you need to get out more.