Gbaji might have a field day?Follow

Oh God.. Why must you call down that thunder?

No good will come of this. Mark my words.

Hillary Clinton is the worst kind of evil. She is a corporate ***** that has time and time again voted with the crowd in the senate. She has claimed she has experience that is crucial to being a leader. Too bad she only has experience in being a lemming. She has an authoritarian position on the powers of the president and has said that she wishes that Congress would just trust the president on most things. Finally I dislike her view of video game violence causing actual violence.

In short srsly haet her
/GObama

"Kind" sort of implies that there is more than one.

So "fiscal conservative" is now defined as someone who'll raise taxes, increase federal spending, but hey! At least she "knows how she'll pay for everything!" (raise taxes).

No, That's Ronald Regan.

Common mistake.

Get back to caitsith!

You have so not been paying attention.



For at least a year the OOT has been playing more and more by the Asylum rules. The admins were finally starting to do something to crack down on this, but there was a final catalyst that made them come out and tell the entire OOT collectively that half the OOT posters had outgrown the OOT and should be posting in the Asylum if they wanted to keep posting in the same way.

Everyone who keeps posting in the OOT has had to start abiding by the old OOT rules:

Don't break the swear filter, don't post any NSFW links, keep all pictures and stories 13+

Most especially: No flaming, no trolling, no being mean about any poster's friends or relatives who are not also on the forum to defend themselves. Stop with the humour that comes out of cruelty or adult concepts.

The OOT has had a fortnight of large quantities of completely disappeared posts, and a disciplinary scattering of mutings, Admin edited posts and locked threads.

Admins have flat out told certain regular OOT posters to take themselves to the Asylum, to be free and have fun. While they are welcome in the OOT still, of course, they are asked to curtail themselves there.

There's been at least two Asylum threads about this, probably more.

Edited, Feb 14th 2008 3:21am by Aripyanfar

Personally I like it here more. You guys have better threads about stuff I like.

Wait, is this a trick?

Why so? Did you think that "conservative" was somehow incompatible with the idea of limiting the impact/footprint that government has on the citizens?


What do you think conservative means? Or maybe its the word "fiscal" that confusing you?

That's wonderful. Except you missed the part where the debt held by public has stayed at a constant 36-38% of GDP for Bush's entire time in office, while average tax burden has been reduced by about 15% across the board.

Nice try though! ;)



And yet, that's not actually what a fiscal conservative is. Has it occurred to you that you simply don't know the definition of the phrase?

You're correct that debt is also a "footprint" on the citizens and therefor something to be avoided. But taxes are even moreso. More significantly, the political reality is that it's "hard" to decrease spending. No one wants to cut their favorite program. It's easy to increase spending. It's "hard" to raise taxes (no one wants to pay more money to the government). It's easy to lower taxes (usually).

What this means is that in order to do something like decrease spending, you have to convince people that there's a "need" to do so. If you don't lower taxes first, you can't convince them of that need. Afterall, there's plenty of money to pay for those programs, right? So why cut them? If you create a small deficit, you can use that as leverage to decrease spending over time.


I'll point out that the Liberals do this in reverse. They don't start with tax cuts. You never hear them campaign on a "raising taxes" agenda. They campaign on all the neato things they're going to do with government. New programs to help the poor, feed the hungry, etc... Of course, after they get approval for those things (remember. That's "easy"), then they've created a "need" to raise taxes (cause otherwise we'll increase debt, right?).

It goes both ways. But in both cases, you have to create a gap between what you are taxing and what you are spending in order to push for a change in the direction you really want to go. Fiscal Conservatives will cut taxes first, and then hope that this is followed by a decrease in spending. Fiscal Liberals will increase spending first, and hope that this is followed by an increase in taxes.


So yeah. You can call it "wishful thinking", but that's how things work.



If it was privatized, it wouldn't be "government" now would it?


I also think you're missing the point. It's about tax burden. Period. What form the government takes, or how things are done isn't what matters. You seem to want to expand the definition of fiscal conservative to include a whole bunch of things that don't have anything to do with it. A fiscal conservative cares about one thing: Reducing tax burden on the citizens. Yes. Debt is important, but only to the degree to which it'll have to be paid off with future taxes. It's a secondary thing...

Privatization is a whole different issue.

Sorry Gbaji, but I think the problem lies in whether you're going by the definition of someone who is fiscally conservative, or the whackjob political doublespeak version of fiscally conservative.

The real world definition of a fiscal conservative is anyone who spends less money than they take in. It's only in government that we see the disconnect between profit and expenses.

Furthermore, anyone who says that cutting taxes while increasing the national debt is fiscally conservative is a con artist. All that is really happening is the taxes are being defered to the future, and because of interest, you are actually increasing what we are paying for government services, we just aren't paying for it now. I'm sorry, but aside from honest emergencies or vastly expensive items like cars, homes or college, it is a ****-poor idea to get $1 worth of services and end up paying $1.20 for it. The same goes for government.

And yes, I understand that this is the whole basis for the credit industry, but the fact that this country is drowning in debt. National debt, state and local government debt, corporate debt and personal debt are all at record levels. It's completely unsustainable, and when it comes crashing down on us like it did in the housing market, the economic pain we feel is going to be legendary.

Of course. If the process chosen to pay off that debt is "raising taxes". It's all about taxes, not the spending. Obviously, there's a relationship, but the ultimate goal of fiscal conservatism is to reduce the tax burden. Everything else is a means to that end.



They mean the same thing. Economically, the "footprint" of the government is how much it's taxing. If someone can manage to operate a 10 trillion dollar government without taxing anyone, then that's perfectly OK by the ideals of fiscal conservatives. It may violate other ideals that those same people *also* hold, but that's a separate issue.



Yes. I call that the "Smasharoo definition". The focus on spending as the defining criteria of fiscal conservatives is an invention by the left so as to make it more easy to attack fiscal conservatives as "failing to even meet their own agenda!!!".

It's about taxes. It's always about taxes. Everything else is a means to that end.






And you turned to Wiki?

Here's a better source




It's about taxes. Not debt. Not spending. Taxes. Those other things are related, but are not the "goals" of fiscal conservatives.



Edited, Feb 14th 2008 4:40pm by gbaji