> There is no fiscal conservative left in America.

Truer words have never been spoken. Fiscal conservatism died with Reagan.

Yes, Reagan the fiscal conservative who tripled the deficit and national debt:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/e...

Greek austerity imposed by Germans had resulted in the doubling of debt as percentage of GDP.

Which Germans imposed Greek austerity? AFAIK Greek austerity was imposed by Greece's major creditors, but Germany was only one of many.

Between Brussels and Frankfurt (EU institutions I mean) the general consensus was that the Greek situation was more akin to loansharking than anything else. And Germany was undeniably the largest driving factor behind this approach, and the country that most benefited from it.

But what was the better alternative for Greece?

In what way was Reagan a fiscal conservative other than making the poor targets for pain? He destroyed half the social safety net in this country while running on a hideously bigoted platform and STILL ended up spending an insane amount of money compared to his predecessors. The only fiscal conservative of the past 50 years in the White House was Bill Clinton.

> He destroyed half the social safety net in this country

Democrats controlled the House the whole time, so how’d he manage that?

> while running on a hideously bigoted platform

What a remarkable assertion.

Neoliberal democrats

The monkey tape is revealing.

Revealing of what? That racist jokes were normalized back in the 1970s? It’s not like we stopped telling exactly that same joke—we just changed the social norm around who is allowed to tell that joke. Are you more likely to treat people fairly because you won’t tell that joke (but would still laugh at the similar Dave Chapelle bits?) and what does it have to do with his platform?

I saw an interview where Bill quipped "You know how we balanced the budget? We used a little thing called 'arithmetic'."

Imagine a candidate who could make a quick, sharp and accurate quip.

Out here in the wider world, American elections are more terrifying every time they come around.

That one of the two American political parties believes they can lower the deficit by cutting taxes (primarily for the wealthy but that's immaterial to the basic math here) has always created some sense of unreality for me; I really no longer understand what the goal is for many of these people and I often think that they don't really know either. It's almost pure nihilism except when it comes to lust for power.

It's much less deep then nihilism.

Their goal is simply to live their life as richly as they can at the expense of those they consider less than themselves. They are the wealthy and they act accordingly.

Why anyone sees Republicans as anything else boggles my mind.

Anyone who isn't a billionaire and is voting Republican may as well be a turkey voting for Thanksgiving.

Fiscal conservatism died with fiat and John Maynard Keynes' "In the long run we are all dead."

maybe more like Bush. Clinton was the last president who oversaw a brief surplus in the federal budget and once said "the era of big government is over".

pretty wild to think that surplus was in part driven by the internet boom. now we have some kind of stock market boom while the federal deficit is 10% of total GDP and national debt is growing by a trillion dollars (a million times a million) every 100 days or so.

"Fiscal conservativism" is the equivalent of a household not purchasing any insurance, not going to the doctor or dentist, and saying "look how affordable everything is if we cut out all those stupid things? It's wasteful spending!" Then you get into a car accident, go to the hospital, lose your job, and cry about the inefficiency of the market because you now have a huge bill that you can't pay. It's short sighted at best. True fiscal conservatism would be all about social safety nets and free education to grow the economy, but y'all just want to save a few hundred bucks on your property taxes, everything else be damned.

Woah, you sound like Adam Smith (the real one, not the one worshipped by alleged acolytes who clearly never read a word he wrote).

I often like to observe that there is capitalism and then there is Capitalism with a an uppercase--dare I say "capital"--letter C.

The first is a kind of economic engineering with trade-offs and conditions and acknowledged edge-cases, the second is a brand supported by some rather culty dogma.

> True fiscal conservatism would be all about social safety nets and free education to grow the economy

Which is why Italy and France have such strong economies, right? What’s really standing in the way of economic growth is that the government isn’t paying for people to get free degrees in left wing studies.

or the Scandinavian countries that generally have higher spending power than the us.

remember not to conflate a strong economy with an economy that is worth living in. you can possess minimum paid jobs in order to make profits for shareholders and never see a dime of that wealth yourself, but alas, you live in a strong economy.

> or the Scandinavian countries that generally have higher spending power than the us.

Do they? PPP they all have lower disposable income than the US and they are not even at the top in Europe (including social transfers). Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands are above Norway and Sweden is even lower than France.

Also, Norway's PPP is as high as it is only because of North-Sea oil revenue.

that is used for a sovereign wealth fond. Norway produces less oil than the us.

Right, but the US has 60 times as many people. Norway's per capita oil revenue is very high.

Of course we have higher Disposable Income in the US, it's a useless metric for these sorts of comparison purposes as it includes expenditures for things like healthcare, which in most other places is paid for by taxes (aka. not part of disposable income). A more useful metric would be Discretionary Income.

The OECD economists are pretty smart cookies, and account for government services delivered in kind (like healthcare). The net adjusted household disposable income includes the value of government provided healthcare: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/ (“Household adjusted disposable income includes income from economic activity (wages and salaries; profits of self-employed business owners), property income (dividends, interests and rents), social benefits in cash (retirement pensions, unemployment benefits, family allowances, basic income support, etc.), and social transfers in kind (goods and services such as health care, education and housing, received either free of charge or at reduced prices).”) So the income top line in European countries is higher than the actual income to account for the value of those services.

I agree that you can’t conflate a strong economy with one worth living in. But OP was saying that we should invest in education for economic growth, and that doesn’t make sense. There’s trade offs to be made between growth and quality of life.

It’s not true Scandinavian countries have more spending power. The OECD keeps very detailed economic data. The US has the highest PPP disposable income in the OECD: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di.... It’s about 67% higher than Sweden and Denmark.

Now you might say, but Swedes and Danes live longer and are happier. That’s true! But as far as I can tell, Americans would rather live shorter lives and have more TVs and trinkets. My parents came back from traveling in Australia. My mom was ranting for weeks about how small and close together the houses are and nobody can get really rich. We are immigrants from a third world country. All of my family members that have come here think that “making it” means living in a McMansion and driving an SUV. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, or the people who come here are just that way, or maybe a bit of both. But it’s worth contemplating that Americans are making rational choices based on their particular utility functions.

You are using a straw man. The reason we have a democracy and freedom of speech is so that each of us can voice our opinions and vote for those that share them. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect.

I'm using the term as it's used 9/10 times it comes up. I've never in my life met a self proclaimed fiscal conservative that didn't just mean "I want lower taxes". The way to lower taxes is a healthy and intelligent population. That is seen as a cost but is actually an investment that pays massive dividends. That's what a fiscal conservative would do, invest at the societal level. Otherwise they're basically just a libertarian.

So a strawman. You set up the premise, you set up your misunderstanding, and then expect everyone else to follow your misunderstanding. You've even redefined what a "fiscal conservative" would actually do (if you were the one defining it).

Then you pulled in "libertarian" out of nowhere. Which is an obvious set up for another strawman, so lets lean into it. Whats a "libertarian"?

I have no skin in this because I don't live in the USA and don't want to, but no, everything in the comment you replied to falsifies "So a strawman".

You can be wrong without being a strawman. When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.

> You can be wrong without being a strawman.

Sometimes yes, but not always.

> but if every example you have of X is Y

Is that actually true though? Are you not assuming perfect rationality on behalf of the poster, and that they have an adequate sample size, which tends to be subject to who the individual associates with.

> it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y"

That depends on the truth of the matter.

>when you're wrong, it's a black swan.

Only if the initial guess was correct.

You may be describing appearances. That which cannot be seen does in fact exist, it just doesn't seem like it because it exists in a different realm, and how our culture is trained to think about such problems spaces.

> everything in the comment you replied to falsifies "So a strawman".

No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.

Does your understanding of reasoning consist solely of the dichotomy "every position is either a QED or a strawman"?

Does yours?

> When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.

Either way, I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth, I hope you don't go around proclaiming you're the arbiter of all that's right in the world.

> Does yours?

The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.

> I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth

If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.

Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:

> No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.

> The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.

No.

> If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.

Lets see, you deliberately trolling and being bad faith is somehow my issue. Interesting.

> Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:

No. You lack the fundamentals.

I only want lower taxes if I see my current tax money being spent very irresponsibly, like "forgiving" student loans...