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.