Fireball wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 5:39 pm
geezer wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 1:43 pm
I approve of your goals for government (that I clipped for brevity), but I too am genuinely curious as to who Fireball thinks would make up this large party of socialist racists against same-sex marriage but for national health care.
It wouldn't be large compared to the Republicans or Democrats, but there are a lot of people of color and working poor Christians who would support leftwing policies regarding taxes, social spending and health care, but who hold absolutely retrograde positions on most social issues. Plenty of African-American ministers and traditional Catholics support an expanded welfare state but adamantly oppose gay rights and abortion. White people in this group tend to vote Republican, while people of color in this group tend to vote Democratic.
I know brevity is next to godliness, but it is not my strength.
I see your point Fireball. I completely forgot that people don't define social issues as the same. Which makes sense, I wouldn't define equal rights for dogs as a social issue on the same level as healthcare for all. But I suspect PETA would.
Fireball wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 5:47 pm
Except that doesn't produce coherent government. You can't achieve progressive goals in social policy if you also follow conservative tax or spending policies, because the concentration of wealth and power (almost entirely in the hands of older, male white people) is the fundamental cause of most forms in inequality in our nation, particularly racial and gender-based inequality.
Right. I do agree. You couldn't achieve progressive goals by using conservative ideology. Size of government, to me, is a really bad way of running the country. Slashing or even increasing spending by x% does nothing. Which is why I also said that programs and spending should be smarter, not smaller or bigger. We should be looking at successful programs, dissecting them to see what makes them work and implementing similar processes where ever possible. By the same process, we should be looking at programs that are not working or could be made better and either fixing or replacing them.
So when I say I'd pick from conservative ideas, it's not quite as literal as pulling from bucket R and bucket D, but a sit down and figure out how can we achieve goal X at a reasonable cost. By having conservatives, willing to have an open and honest discussion, on the team, it would help to achieve the reasonable cost. But only if the primary objective is achieve goal X, not reduce the budget by any means. If goal X requires $10 to achieve, spending $8 on it might not be a good idea. If the conservative is coming in saying we can only spend $8 and refuses to see the goal as worthy of achieving at $10, then there is a problem. Which is the situation we are in now. You can't run a country that way. But a conservative who was involved in the process who said, what if we did Z which would be as effective as Y and achieve goal X, but only cost $9, you still achieve the goal, but you save money. That's the process I'd suggest. And I'd include in that whether or not goal X is something worth achieving and whether goal X is worth achieving at $10 if goal W would then would have to be cut.
Balance is needed. Balance to pick the right programs to achieve the goals and balance to target spending at a necessary level to achieve the goals. I don't think the level of spending should be an ideological goal at all. Which is why I'm not a conservative by the current definitions.
Same with taxation. Cutting taxes as a goal without balancing that against need is pointless. To me taxes should be set primarily based on 1. paying for spending and 2. used to achieve goals by manipulating capitalism. Though I admit 2 would be hard to balance. It's more of a dream than a reality I suspect.
5. paying for what we do spend
6. Reducing the debt by meeting 5 and then heavily taxing death and accumulated wealth until the debt is at a reasonable and manageable level, (with a robust debate of what is reasonable).
A small quibble here is that it is healthy, and even economically beneficial, for the government to run a small deficit, and our present level of debt is completely sustainable and we shouldn't worry about it. We could run a deficit of 2%-2.5% of below forever without any negative impact on the economy.
I would disagree here, not because you are wrong, I think what you said is correct in many ways. I'd disagree about it being sustainable under current circumstances because we don't know what's going to happen in the future. What happens the next time there is a crisis, a war or economic? We have to increase spending beyond the 2-2.5%. The debt grows bigger. When the crisis is over we drop back down to a reasonable amount, but now the percentage of the budget being paid out to interest on the debt is 10% instead of 7%. Interest rates are going up, so the cost of debt will continue to rise, meaning that the percentage of the budget going towards interest payment goes up, meaning less money for other priorities.
I don't think we can say the deficit is only 2% this year, that's fine, when we should planning for 2,5, even 10 or 20 years down the road. Balance. The interest payment is ~around $300,000,000,000 per year. Is everything that's gone into the debt so far worth that? That's a lot of money that could be used someplace else. And it's growing.
So while I can agree that some amount of deficit spending is both ok and sustainable under some circumstances, I don't think our current level is that when you include the growing debt and growing interest payments into the calculation. Bringing the deficit spending down and even bringing the debt down if possible, gives more flexibility for future need.
That said, if current spending levels were effective and achieving the intended goals, I'd say it was worth it. However, too many programs are simply ineffective. A great example is our dingbat leader. He's going to spend $12 billion to bailout farmers that wouldn't need a bailout if he hadn't put them in the situation! And he can do it because a Congress many years ago dumped their Constitutional fiscal responsibility onto the executive branch. That's not an effective use of what will be borrowed money in my opinion.
An opposite example would be infrastructure. Everything I've read indicates our roads and underlying water infrastructure is deteriorating and in many cases already well beyond safe levels. In addition, infrastructure spending increases the economy in the short term by providing jobs and increases it in the long term by providing efficiency bonuses to both government and private entities in the increase of delivery, decreased maintenance and insurance. So we get a better economy and increased tax revenue from the better economy that might just pay for the interest on the debt used to fund it. But because it's "spending" conservatives don't want to do it. Where a moderate or balanced conservative would agree that infrastructure spending is needed, but would watch the specifics to make sure it was spent on projects that benefit the country and not are just wasted money.
gbasden wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 8:20 pm
I find what you say appealing, but from what I can see there simply isn't any way of having compromise government right now. The conservative position seems to be that the Federal Government does nothing except for a very robust armed forces and anything that isn't that gets cut. Taxes are cut to below bare minimum and there will be absolutely no social safety net. The liberal position is about 180 degrees away from that. The ACA was supposed to be a compromise health care bill - a market based solution that came from conservative sources. You can see how well that was received.
That said, we are pretty similar in our wants.
I agree, that's why I'll vote for Democrats and hope to get reality based conservatives some day and hope, in the meantime, that we don't end up so far to the socialist side that we slip into liberal authoritarianism.
Kraken wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 11:01 pm
Radical moderates will be the end of this country.
I always wanted to be the downfall of a country.
