Exactly. It’s a transparent ruse they use to bash democrats. They don’t actually care about fiscal “conservatism”. The base falls for it every time.

But the base doesn’t seem to want fiscal conservatism either, so the only ones who really fell for it were Democrats who took the Republicans’ position seriously, and the conservative intellectual movement pushing the policy.

Yeah cause it's all those red cities and states that are demanding we bail out their pensions using Covid as an excuse for the fiscal implosions they've been warned about for decades.

At the national level, both sides tend to claim one ideal and ignore it whenever they get into office in order to pay back their base - Republicans give tax breaks to the already-wealthy, Democrats tend to rain cash down on academia, school unions, legal industry, etc.

At the state and locality level, it's generally the rule that more conservative states and counties are in better fiscal shape, and that's with typically far lower taxes.

> At the state and locality level, it's generally the rule that more conservative states and counties are in better fiscal shape, and that's with typically far lower taxes.

Only because the federal government redistributes wealth from coastal states to interior ones.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/05/12/blue-state...