I second that. Or third it. This doesn’t need to be another thread about putting boots into the asses of foreigners.
Here’s my thought: one can be fiscally responsible or irresponsible; conservative or liberal. Fiscal liberalism does not equate to fiscal irresponsibility – Clinton raised taxes, raised spending, and balanced the budget. Republican fiscal conservatives cut taxes and have run up huge deficits.
I do get tired of people defining themselves as “fiscally conservative” just because, you know, it’s a cool thing to be. It has turned into such a buzzword that I’d bet most Americans would self-identify as being fiscally conservative without thinking about what it means. I think the OP has bought into that amorphous definition (“living within one’s means”) as opposed to differentiating between conservatism and the alternatives. If one supports a progressive income tax, opposes tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than the rest, and doesn’t like the idea of cutting Social Security simply to balance the budget, I’m having a hard time seeing how one can lay claim to being fiscally conservative.
The budget is coming back into alignment. The revenue increases due to the tax cuts are catching up with the increased 9/11 war spending.
Remember, there is a WAR going on. You people act like this is the 90’s when it comes to military spending.
I agree that cutting taxes while raising spending can’t be considered “fiscally conservative”. But I wouldn’t call a government that spends 50% of a country’s GDP “fiscally conservative” just because it didn’t run a deficit. That country is living within its means, no? It might be “fiscally responsible”, but it isn’t conservative. I know that conservative has come to be almost meaningless term these days, but if doesn’t stand for small government, then it loses one of it’s defining characteristics. And I’m assuming that we’re talking in an American context here. A Russian “conservative” might very well be a communist, since he wants to conserve what came before.
I see your point about the distinction, but the 50% figure sounds somewhat arbitrary. IYO, is there a figure for government spending as a percentage of GDP that provides a clear quantitative dividing line between “fiscally conservative” and “not conservative”? Or failing that, are there are least clear-cut ends of the spectrum, where you would be willing to state categorically that anything over (say) 50% is not conservative and anything under (say) 25% is conservative?
Here’s a little 2x2 thing I just thought up, which may or may not throw light on these concepts…
Higher taxes + higher spending = fiscal liberalism
higher taxes + lower spending = greed
lower taxes + higher spending = idiocy
lower taxes + lower spending = fiscal conservatism
How’s that? 
Plus, the first and last combos would both come under ‘fiscal responsibility’ whilst the middle two would not.
I might argue that we would need a period of “greed” to pay off the national debt. Whether it is a good idea to retire the debt is one thing, but you can’t do it without running surpluses for an extended period.
Huh, good point. I guess I was automatically assuming a starting point of no deficit (nor surplus), which obviously isn’t the case at the mo.
Sorry, I should have said “for example”.
When does water get hot? 
In and American context, and assuming we’re not a war* somewhere, my own personal opinion would put it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% for the federal government. I think we’ve stayed pretty stead at 18 - 22% of GDP (federal government only) since the 60s. But I’m not going to claim any authority for that figure. It’s a nice round number that’s about half of what we’ve been speanding since the Great Society days.
*and I mean a real war, like WWII, not Bush’s phony War on Terror.
[ Moderating ]
Trotsky, Der Trihs, and ANYONE ELSE: this thread is not about bin Laden or Islamism or responses to terrorism or any related issues. It is not even about Clinton or G W Bush.
Do not post on those topics again* in this thread–not even to just point out what you consider to be some egregious error in another’s earlier post. If you need to wrangle over those issues, then open a new thread, linking back to this thread, if you feel a reference is necessary.
- Bush’s and Clinton’s financial administrations may be referenced (with hard data) to indicate a position regarding fiscal conservatism, but there will be no more references to the issues of terrorism or war.
[ /Moderating ]
This simply isn’t true on any basis. You’re aware, I hope, that large numbers of “common people” in the U.S. have a de facto negative taxation rate due to the EITC, and Martin Hyde has done an excellent job of demonstrating in this thread that even after Bush’s tax cuts, a small portion of the tax base (those awful awful “rich” people) are carrying a huge proportion of the tax burden. The “rich” benefit more from tax breaks only to the extent that they pay so much more in taxes to begin with. It’s hard to deliver a tax break to a person paying no taxes.
It can be, but you have to look at overall tax burdens from state and federal sources. As the feds cut back, oftentimes the states have to (or do) step in to pick up the slack, and state tax revenue sources can be (though they don’t have to be) more regressive than federal tax revenue sources. That’s kind of indirect, and I blame those states with more regressive tax structures, but that doesn’t change the facts.
n.b.: I think you’re more right than wrong about the “simply isn’t true” part, but once you added the “on any basis”, I think you oversimplified things.
It also depends on what you mean by “carrying more of the load”—is “the load” only taxes, or funding for social needs in general? As Martin Hyde and I were discussing in a recent thread, tax cuts generally result in wealthier taxpayers paying a higher share of the total tax burden (even when their own taxes get cut). So the “common people” don’t generally end up “carrying more of the load” in the strict sense of “load” as federal taxes alone.
If we factor in things like middle-class taxpayers picking up the slack on formerly tax-funded services, though, it may be more true that they end up with a heavier load to carry after taxes are cut. Not just through the increased state and local taxes that John Mace mentioned, but also through out-of-pocket spending (e.g., parents of schoolchildren having to raise money for school services that were formerly provided through federal grants, or poor people having to spend more for medical care after Medicaid cuts).
I think it’s pretty clear that, for Reagan Republicans, at least that fiscal conservative=lower taxes without regard to spending. A politician saying that he is fiscally conservative is essentially a code for saying that he wants to lower taxes. Yes, in an ideal world fiscal conservative would mean balanced budget, but that’s not what it means in this world.
They’re not all in their graves yet – but, looking at the political scene, they might as well be.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s generally easier to cut taxes than to cut spending. So, even if a pol is really committed to doing both, he may end up only being able to cut taxes. I guess if someone is truly committed to fiscal responsibility, he will cut spending first, and then let the lower taxes follow. But even then, it’ll be easier for someone else to raise spending than to raise taxes.
They have most of the money; they pay more in absolute dollars even as taxes fall because the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else keeps getting huger and huger. And a lot of the burden has been shifted to the common people by such means as fees for services that used to be tax funded, or by shifting from income taxes to taxes that hurt the rich less.
Martin Hyde was using statistics that hid some underlying flaws in his general premise. The part of the Bush tax cuts that I find offensive are the cuts in capital gains rates and dividend rates. Warren Buffett has a lower tax rate than his secretary.