So I get very frustrated when trying to figure out who to vote for because neither party seems to really represent fiscal conservatism. Supposedly republicans are the party of fiscal conservatism but lets look at two recent examples to see why this isn't the case.The first is Ronald Reagan. During his first year in office the US ran a deficit of 79 Billion. For his 3rd thru 8th year our country consistently ran deficits of 150 billion or more. Also we were in a recession for most of his first two years so this increase in deficit spending after we are out of the recession is even less understandable.
The second is George W Bush. During most of Clinton's second term the US actually ran a surplus and according to the budget office we were expected to run a 5 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. During Bush's first year we ran a 120 Billion surplus, however in all 7 years after that we always ran a deficit of at least 150 Billion. How is this being fiscally conservative?
Democrats aren't any better at cutting deficits. Just look at the trillion dollar deficits that Obama has run. The deficits were likely bigger because of the recession but I don't see how he would have reduced them with his policies either. Democrats generally like costly government programs, and spending lots of money even if you pay for it with extra taxes is not fiscally conservative.
The only time during my life that the government was acting mostly responsible was during Bill Clinton's second term. The Republicans controlled congress with a Democratic president and together they adopted pay as you go policies so that all new programs were paid for with either spending cuts elsewhere or tax increases. This is the only time in recent history that we ran a surplus.
While I'd really like to blame both political parties for this mess I think that the average voter is the one really at fault. Many voters in this country vote for whoever promises them the most benefits. Many people vote republican because they are hoping for bigger tax cuts. Others vote democratic because they think the government programs will be a bigger help to them. I truly believe that it is a minority of voters who really want to hold the parties responsible for keeping down the deficit and these voters are not unified in a single party (I don't have hard statistics for this and I don't know how you would get them).
So at the end of the day the same people who live paycheck to paycheck and max out their credit cards elect politicians who max out our government's credit card because they are all more worried about today than the futures.
Some of these people who are more worried about today are in an understandable position where they are having trouble keeping their house and putting food on the table. The others just annoy me because they are destroying our country's future by enabling these irresponsible politicians.
In a previous blog you had comment on how balancing the budget is unrealistic due to the large support for the most expensive programs. Here it reads as though you feel it is important to have some form of balanced budget. Can you explain how to merge these 2 stands? How could this practicably be achieved? Also, under Bush, was his large amount of spending due to the 9/11 attacks? How much of the deficit is caused by the war, and what would the numbers look like if that was removed from the equation?
ReplyDeleteI know I am asking a lot, and am not contributing much knowledge of my own. I am not well informed in this area. I am interested on your take though.
Balancing the budget is incredibly difficult because of the large support of many expensive programs that take up most of our budget (like defense, medicare/medicaid, and social security) and a huge resistance to tax increases.
ReplyDeleteIn my earlier post I was complaining about politicians claiming they can balance the budget without cutting popular programs or raising taxes. This isn't true and I showed that via a tool that politicians know almost nothing about called math. (I'm mostly kidding about politicians not knowing math but they assume that the average voter won't look at the budget enough to realize they are lying.)
In this post I was trying to show that voters themselves are somewhat responsible for the bad behavior of politicians. I think that fixing this would take a significant effort on the part of people who care about fixing our budget but I'm not sure that most of these people have ever thought about the problem in quite this way so I'm trying to make them aware of one of the root causes of our budget problem.
I think that there are people in both parties who want to balance the budget but many of them are more concerned about other problems and the budget never becomes a priority.
After re-reading my blog post I can see that this post wasn't well put together or easy to follow. I need to learn from this and do better in the future.
ReplyDeleteI still believe that all the information in this post was factual but the goal of this blog is to put together easy to follow arguments to help people understand how our government works and I think failed in this post. I will try to do better in the future.