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There was a brief moment when I was a young and impressionable voter who thought yeah, that makes sense. Being fiscally conservative. Having a government that lives within its means.
Then I had a look at the track record of conservative governments and had a good, long, belly laugh, and have never voted for one in my life.
There’s decades and decades of data now - every way you measure the economy, corporate earnings per share, employment rate, GDP - performance soars under democratic rule and tanks under republican rule.
Yeah. My observation on this is that the more conservative party takes power when there is already an economic boom and takes all the credit for it. Then, once they ruin everything, the liberal side has to step in and repair all the damage.
There seems to be this fundamental problem with democracy that when times are good, people don’t want to pay taxes, and they vote in the party that promises to lower them. But then when the economy tanks, they want that safety net again. It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what would happen if you had it the other way? So while times are good, you raised the taxes so that the government would have a cushion to weather the next economic downturn and help everyone back on their feet.
It would help if there were many examples of real, significant fiscal conservatism. Instead it is almost always “reduce spending that doesn’t directly benefit me” which is very different.
Like most “conservative” policies.
That coupled with “decrease government income (taxes)” as the first resort means conservative governments always start off in a deficit position and most never get out of it. Decreasing taxes has not done anything to improve the lower 99% lives. It has only worked to shovel money into the 1%.
Yeah, there is a difference now, isn’t there? Like I reached voting age in the Reagan era (Mulroney here in Canada, but he was a carbon copy of Reagan). In those days, the conservative philosophy seemed to be just keep spending like crazy while slashing taxes (mostly corporate). Then leave the next government to clean up the mess with an austerity program.
But Trump/Musk actually did gut all sorts of programs while still somehow running up a jaw-dropping deficit, even by Republican standards. Americans are paying higher taxes (through tariffs) and losing services at the same time. Seems pretty indefensible, and I hope there is a reckoning at the mid-terms. Here in Canada, our government is also running a large deficit, mind you. I think it’s sort of unavoidable, though, given we are under economic siege.