Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve seen any of those in my lifetime. I’m Canadian and even Steven Harper, who would be almost a Democrat by American standards, wanted to go to war with the census for Reasons.
Broadly though, my understanding of Conservative values, peeling back the state, more self reliance etc is broadly unpopular to the many who think the state has a big role to play in social welfare from education to healthcare
If you could offer just rough ideas/goals, what would your sane, honest Conservative budget feature? Not looking to fight just genuinely curious. (No numbers obviously but like what would you want to cut. No vague “government waste” though please.)
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I don’t mean specifically politically conservative rather an economic conservative plan. It wouldn’t be too crazy if we cut taxes and cut spending at the same time. That’s unpopular though because so many never studied econ
Lauchs@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fair but I’m not sure what the point of spending cuts is beyond ,shrinking the state, cooling down an overheated economy or reducing a deficit. What am I missing?
A lot of government spending is super popular (think entitlements, healthcare, infrastructure etc.) I have an econ degree (admittedly, not particularly used as I’m now a dev) but I’m still not seeing a particular impetus…
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If you are going to reduce the revenue you are taking in you need to cut spending to avoid creating a deficit or debt, and yes you would do this to cool off an economy or to pay off debt should you cut spending without cutting taxes.
Lauchs@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh, if the impetus is just to cut taxes, well I don’t think that’s particularly ideal.
If you’re cutting taxes in the hopes of Laffer striking again, fine but that’s supposed to be revenue generating.
If you’re cutting taxes for the sake of lower taxes, then you need to have some services in mind that are worth less than the value of the tax cuts, not just in terms of dollars but in terms of what they do. For example, you could cut SNAP benefits but yeah, most would be against that because feeding poor kids is pretty popular.
I don’t think these are unpopular because people don’t know economics so much as there aren’t many services they’d give up for marginally lower taxes.