Do Conservatives Understand That Liberals Don't Really Like Government Spending?

Great Debates
81

So can I assume that the liberals on the board will now stop justifying increased spending because to NOT do so would tank the economy? If you don’t like government spending then why not cut spending or at the very least put a freeze on spending so that it cannot increase?

I accept that both sides enjoy spending money like a drunk panda in Peking because spending money on pork or bamboo beer gets you re-elected.

The problem with this plan is the separation of income and expenditures. What about step 1.5 of Creeate a budget no more than 110% of revenue. Adjust spending and/or taxation to accomplish this.

82

How progressive? Why? Why not more progressive or less progressive? Does fairness come into play?

Excellent. I assume that conservatives have some say in these stated goals, right?

More excellence.

I’m with you.

Still with you.

Can you offer a plausible reason why one should not substitute “expand” for evolve? I can’t think of many taxes that have gone down, or programs that liberals have wanted to end. Can you help me out here?

83

All the conservatives that I know, and that is quite a few, are genuinely convinced that a major part of government spending is going to the idle, citizens who refuse to work and illegal immigrants, both of whom live completely off government largesse. Each and every one of my conservative friends and family members firmly believes this as if it were gospel. They are also equally convinced that the “facts” that the liberal media reports are controlled by that same group living off government largesse. In essence they believe that liberals, like Obama, win office by paying off the idle from government coffers, they just don’t use the word Demagog. So in that sense, yes, they believe that liberals really like government spending because that is what gets them into office.

I think this is in part because they are hard working people who fear losing what they have and they aren’t political junkies enough to look into the fearmongering that they hear. My mom is a perfect example. She has lived for decades completely on government funds: retirement, SS and Medicare, yet she is deathly afraid of welfare cheats and immigrants “bleeding the system dry.” She has no interest in politics at all except to vote as a patriotic duty but she would no more vote for a non-Republican than she would open her doors to a bunch of drunken hobos.

84

These discussions are really interesting to me (I lurk a lot) but tend to always just deteriorate into tribal sniping from the trenches. Perhaps because the initial question, whether intended or not, will always be interpreted as an attack on the group that is being asked. It would be more interesting to see self-critisism from either “side”.

I’m neither liberal or conservative, and those american labels would largely be pointless in the context of my culture, but I see simmilar problems from the group I associate with. I was a politician for 6 years and started out somewhat in the political trenches, but as I learned and evolved I became less and less partisan. Today I am ashamed at some of the opinions I once held, not so long ago.

My party is the Green party (third largest of eight) and we have a problem very simmilar to the one described in the OP. A lot of greens or enviromentalists tend to assume that political groups that don’t agree with them are, for lack of a better word, evil. I’ve often heard members of my own party say things like “X wants to destroy the enviroment”. That is of course an easy, and perhaps attractive answer, but it also assumes that a rather big group are out to destroy or hurt others. Basically that other people are psychopaths.

After spending 6 years talking to and working with politicians from other parties, it gets pretty hard to sustain that notion. Instead, I think you will come to find that even though there is ignorance and egoism in the world, and the world of politics being no exception, the vast majority of people simply want to do what is best based on their values and their understanding of things.

At the very fringe of ideas and movements are people who simply seem to have fallen off the trail. Whether it is some christian nutjob who’s interpreted “Love thy neighbour” as “God hates fags (and so should you!)” or someone believing that the white race is under attack from muslims/blacks/jews/asians. And even they could probably be assumed to have what can be described as “good intentions” at heart. If I believed I was part of a group (white people) that was being targetted by another group (non-white muslims), I might come to the same conclusion as them. But I don’t, so I won’t. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

I also find that it is much more constructive and successful to assume that other people are honest and have good intentions. That makes it possible to communicate with them, which will improve both sides understanding of eachother and perhaps even find common ground. Not the extremists or fundamentalists perhaps, but the vast majority of people don’t fall into that group.

As I grow older I’ve found partisanship to become more and more off putting. I can understand it in younger people who have yet to create a more nuanced world view for themself, from people with more experience, I find it hard to respect it. As a politician, I always try to find out what the right thing is and then try to do it. I assume that most people do the same, even though we can come to different conclusions. I also accept that in every given case, I can be horribly wrong, this also being based on experience.

I assume that most conservatives want to lower taxes because they believe government spending is wasteful, incompetent or counter productive. Because that is the reasons they tend to give. I also have to acknowledge that they are right in some cases. Some government spendin is wasteful, incompetent and counter productive. And I agree that the wasteful, incompetent or counter productive spending should stop.

I assume that american liberals want to raise taxes because they believe that some resources can be spent for greater benefit by the government. And I acknowledge that they’re also right in some cases.

I would support shutting down programs that are wasteful or counter productive and using the surplus as a tax credit. I would also support raising a tax on something harmful and spending it on something useful like education. And I think there would be a big majority for it in any parliament where people voted according to their beliefs and conscience rather than according to what partisanship dictates.

If you actually do believe that “liberals” just want to spend tax money for spendings own sake, your understanding of other peoples motivations has a gap and, you’re basically falling into a trap set by partisans. Partisans are the ones who benefit from demonising their opponents, but everyone else just ends up losing.

85

We’re talking about the present day USofA here, right? So all the current requirements of the legislative process apply, right? That settles 1 thru 5.

Taxes haven’t gone down because of complicated forces not subject to analysis in sound bites; I don’t want to indulge that hijack here. But ‘liberals’ are not inherently opposed to ending programs that have served their purpose and are no longer needed. Subsidies for conglomerate farms or for oil drilling come to mind. Both were initiated to promote some end that was considered highly desirable at the time, but the context has changed and the programs no longer directly serve their intended goals. In some measure we could declare them Mission Accomplished. Other problems are more intractable, and thus modifying the program as its effects can be evaluated, and as the problem itself may evolve over time, seems more appropriate. ‘Education’ with all of its ramifications seems to be an example.

86

You can look at the Democratic platform, if you’re really interested in the gist of the moderate left’s view of the role of government. It isn’t like there’s a secret liberal agenda that nobody has been able to decipher: we’re liberals, not the Illuminati. If you haven’t been able to figure out what your political opponents’ vision for American is, I can only wonder if you’ve actually been paying attention to elections recently.

87

This may be what you have in mind but it is not what you get. Headstart has spent $180 billion since inception and studies show it does not work. Obama just proposed a new program of universal preschool and Headstart is not going away.
Real per pupil spending on education has tripled in the last 40 years and test scores have stagnated during that time. The only change liberals want is more money.
Comprehensive sex ed courses have been shown to be ineffective for the last 30 years and yet they are still getting funded.
Sugar subsidies cost the consumer around $3.5 billion a year and are the reason HFCS is in everything we eat, and yet they have been around for 80 years.
The Nation Resource Conservation Service spends $800 million dollars a year and there is no difference in soil erosion in areas that participate.
The Rural Electrification Administration was created in the depression to bring electricity to rural areas. It is still going seventy years after the depression ended and is costing over $200 million dollars a year.
I could go on but I am sure you will need the space to catalog all the failed programs that liberals have ended.

88

Uh, not really. Here’s what’s still on the table:

How progressive?
Why?
Why not more progressive or less progressive?
Does fairness come into play?

89

That discussion would be a different thread. This is about spending for the sake of spending.

90

So, this is on topic:

But having you define what you mean (which is where the real disagreement lies) is not? Nonsense. But please know that I totally do not blame you for not answering the questions. I wouldn’t want to either if I were you.

91

Several conservative posters here, when invited to make it clear that this was hyperbole, instead doubled down on the statement and attempted to defend it as their literal claim. I was surprised by this, but nevertheless, it is what happened.

92

puddleglum, I’m not going to refute every line of Post 87. Let’s for the sake of example confine ourselves to that thing called Education which you say has “stagnated”. Do you contend that the expenditures currently made provide no education at all? Are we getting nothing for our buck? Because if we are getting something, then that perhaps justifies spending something to get it. Now we can quibble about how much.

I’ll remind you that as population increases, more dollars are required to serve the larger group. And as more technology becomes available, education must become larger and more diverse itself. Where once we taught typing, wood shop, and home ec, now we teach computer skills, mobile banking applications, and self protection from identity theft. The skill level of the teachers must be raised, and the hardware needed in classrooms is different from and more expensive than typewriters, saws, and sewing kits. At the same time we are dealing with a very different population of school children, subject to vastly different societal pressures and with greatly different goals and expectations than were present when I went to public school. None of this can be addressed for free.

Are we getting the best deal possible for our expenditures? Probably not. But nobody – or nobody in a real position of authority – is actually saying we should just “throw money”. Educators evaluate the success or failure of programs in place, and seek funding to fill in gaps and improve goal-reaching. Will these newer, evolved programs actually improve outcomes? We will see. (If they are funded.) The hope and the expectation is that they will. As I said already, we cannot know for sure, since prognostication isn’t an exact science. But nothing in this process supports the contention that liberals just want to spend, spend, spend for no reason.

What we can be pretty certain of is that just slashing budgets isn’t going to improve educational outcomes.

93

Can you point to those posts that attempted to defend the proposition that liberals want to spend for the sake of spending, without the spending having a desired result?

94

My 6 points directly contradict puddleglum’s list which basically repeated the mantra “liberals just spend, spend, spend blindly”. As such, they are on target for this thread.

A debate over appropriate marginal levels of taxation and “fairness” does not.

95

Having a poster clarify what he says is always a valid question. But relax. Like I said, I don’t blame you one tiny bit. In fact, tis a wise decision.

96

Perhaps we can reach some common understanding here. You keep referring to the idea of “spending for the sake of spending”, pointing out that liberals don’t want it but that conservatives believe that liberals want it. Maybe the gap in understanding arises from the understanding of that idea. Perhaps to conservatives, “spending for the sake of spending” conveys the obvious meaning of spending for the sake of enriching the constituencies that benefit from that spending.

I often see politicians of both parties who, by all appearances, reflexively support increased spending in some area, in good economic times and bad, whether spending levels are currently high or low, whether or not research supports the need for more money. Regardless of whether they’re demanding military ships and airplanes that won’t ever serve a single mission or more funding for public schools where funding is already at an all-time high, it’s tough to believe that they have our best interests at heart. It’s much easier to believe that they’re trying to keep the spigots of cash flowing to groups who will then send back some of that cash as campaign contributions.

97

Why must education be more expensive? Computer Labs cost a little more than typewriters and wood lathes, etc, but that is just one expense. Theoretically computers should make it easier to do grades, print worksheets, do lesson plans, and do research. So they should make education more productive, but that has not happened.
Look at what happened in Kansas City, they tripled spending and got no improvements. This not an isolated case, just the most extreme. There is no correlation between increased spending on education and improvements for students. Yet there are always another round of “newer evolved” programs and the hopes and expectations are always as high as they were for the last failed programs.
I would never say that we get no education for the money we spend, we just get no more than we did by spending one third as much. Therefore if the goal is education and not spending for its own sake, we can all agree that education funding should be drastically cut, back to what it was 40 years ago, before we embarked on this huge failed expirement to improve education by spending more money.

98

Forty years ago would be 1973. I actually taught public high school (biology) in 1978. Is that close enough for you?

I used chalk on a black (actually green) board. We got either white or sometimes yellow from school supplies. If I wanted other colors for emphasis I could bring my own. We had a text issued to each student. If I found something appropriate in another book or publication, I could hold it up in front of the classroom. There was no way to copy it for distribution. Oh, there was that weird overhead projector that would accommodate a book, but it weighed a few hundred pounds, came on its own cart, required special appointment to get, and had a fan running about 100 decibels. Not something for everyday use. Handouts, outlines, tests etc. were reproduced by mimeograph. Nasty, smelly, and capable of only a limited number of copies from each original. We graded papers by hand and entered grades into a gradebook similarly.

I taught in an upper middle class location and many of my kids had their own cars. That didn’t directly matter much in the classroom, but it did mean that they had adequate nutrition and weren’t nodding off in 2nd period from lack of calories. And though they may have had the latest stereo at home, they weren’t distracted in class by beepers, cell phones, ipods, pocket computers, ipads or other things currently inseparable from students. None of this accurately tracks with your contention that computers should “make education more productive”. No more accurate is your generalization about “just one expense”. The expense of just keeping classroom equipment less than a decade behind what the students have in their pockets and purses is daunting. And the educational level, the training, of a teacher in today’s classroom is also much more expensive than my own preparation for the classroom of 1978. I’d hardly call adapting yesterday’s methods to today’s circumstances a “huge failed experiment”. Again, just slashing budgets isn’t going to make 2013 teachers any more effective. Nor will it ‘punish’ those whose profligacy offends you. The only losers will be the students.

99

I am old enough to remember teachers used all of those things and when all we had to distract us was the opposite sex. Now there are computer labs, smart boards, and class webpages. The purpose of all those things is to help students learn. Yet the evidence shows that students do not learn any better than they did then. Since student achievement is the point and not spending the evidence says that all the spending has not helped, so the conclusion is removing it will not hurt.

100

No, those things are the *objects *of student learning, not the *purpose *of it. Computer labs, smart devices, web pages, blogs, and message boards are the modern equivalents of paper, pencils, dictionaries and encyclopedias. In order to function in this century, students must be knowledgeable about and facile with modern technology. In the old days we supplied the old materials and taught students how to interact with them. Now we must supply ever more expensive and more diverse technologies, and need ever higher levels of expertise to teach them.

Students today – even students who are struggling academically in their schools – are conversant with a plethora of technologies that the biggest geeks in 1978 couldn’t even imagine. The baseline level of “student achievement” is tremendously higher. Sadly though the amount of new knowledge grows at a logarithmic rate, making it ever more difficult to just stay even. Reducing spending to some idealized past level will only increase the gap between what students know, and what they need to know.