“I am a social liberal, a but fiscal conservative”
I hear people say this a lot and frankly, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of playing nice, being cordial, respecting their opinion, Kumbaya and all that (what someone called timidity.) I think it’s time we all grew a backbone, a la Senator Warren and a rejuvenated President Obama (nice speech last night) and hoisted these people on their own petards.
You say you are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative? Ah, so you must be madly in favor of universal health care, Medicare for all, right? It has been demonstrated worldwide now for generations that this approach to health care has lower costs and better outcomes. So you agree? Splendid, let’s move on.
It costs about $20,000 a year to serve homeless people the traditional way and only $8,000 a year to give them housing. I take that mean you support a radical change in our approach to the growing problem of homelessness as doing so will clearly cost less. So we are simpatico? Marvelous!
It costs about $50,000 for an inmate and about $15,000 for welfare (national averages) per individual. Rather than incarceration of so many poor, it’s clearly a better bang for the buck if we spend our resources on aid to the unfortunate and yes, that means giving them free stuff and it is “redistribution of wealth”, but so is prison, where the inmates all get free stuff and it’s all funded by taxes on working people like you. So given your admission that you are fiscally conservative, you and I will agree once again to spend more on the poor so that fewer of them will wind up costing us more in prison.
On to education, eh? As you are no doubt aware, the USA does not rank highly in test scores when compared to other nations. In fact, there are a couple dozen nations that outperform the USA. We spend a lot of money on education, so how about we follow the leaders on this and make the most of our education dollars in a fiscally conservative manner? What are two common denominators of these other countries? One is a strong labor union and the other is high pay, a salary that competes with the private sector. So yes, while we’ll actually be spending more, our return on investment will be much higher, something that any fiscal conservative would be on board with.
We could go on and on, but I hope you are seeing a pattern here. You don’t need to tell me that you are a social liberal but fiscal conservative as that is redundant, isn’t it? We really do not need the “but”. Social liberals are, as demonstrated above, fiscally conservative. What you do need to stop telling me is that you are socially liberal but adhere to conservative/Republican/Tea Party fiscal policy because that is just a ruse to cover what you really are, and it’s not fiscally conservative, is it?
Christopher says
Classic MA GOP from the 1990s:
Pro-choice
Pro-gay rights
Pro-gun control
Maybe even open to some affirmative action…
…but opposed to increased taxes and spending
When Joe Malone challenged Paul Cellucci for the 1998 gubernatorial nomination from the right on taxes it was noted that only in MA could you have a pro-choice, pro gay rights, pro gun control “conservative”!
pogo says
…and the frame you present is fiscally conservative. Let’s invest in ways that saves taxpayer dollars, instead of spending money for things that do not change outcomes.
Taxpayer dollars are being wasted locking up someone with a drug problem that landed them in jail for stealing–to the tune of about $50,000 a year–when we should be expanding drug courts and investing $15,000 a year for a secured drug rehab beds/half-way houses. Advocating for more drug treatment over jail time is a fiscally responsible position, but the left never positions it that way.
Same is true for the argument for raising the minimum wage. The fiscally responsible/conservative position advocated by the left should be that taxpayers are subsidizing companies because they are not paying their employees livable wages and taxpayers are providing the employees with food stamps, housing subsides, health insurance, ect. The fiscally responsible thing is to stop subsidizing the wages of businesses and make them pay employees more. Sure prices will go up, but government spending will go down (which may not sit well with some here).
Point being is that the left seldom positions social investments as a way of saving taxpayer dollars, when in fact they will.
johntmay says
That has to be our message. It risks being viewed as cold and calculated to just look at the money, so we’d be wise to add in, “in addition to costing less, it works!” or as the business folks like to say, it’s a “win/win”.
pogo says
…”cold and calculated to just look at the money”? If Frank Lutz were a liberal/progressive, he would probably argue that we should frame it in cold business terms–among other things, it would throw the “business GOP types” into fits of anger.
johntmay says
We’ve got to stop being polite in the face of arrogance compounded by ignorance. In other words, the Tea Party and any laborer (that’s 90% of us) who votes Republican.
jconway says
When asked by 60 Minutes how he can back gay marriage in NY state while backing social conservatives across America, Koch said “because at the end of the day economics is what matters most to me”. It’s what should matter most to the rest of us too. The GOP has pro-choice, pro-equality and even pro-gun control members of Congress. Not one of them voted for ACA, not one of them will vote for universal community college, not one of then will vote for universal day care even if it’s the most pro-life policy this President has put forth.
Time to start looking at Democracts the same way Koch looks at Republicans. How do you help working people? If like Feinstein and Lieberman with perfect NARAL, GLADD and PP ratings, your vote is to fuck them over-time to seriously reconsider helping and maybe even time to consider a primary or two.
dave-from-hvad says
that in contracting out more and more government functions and services, we’re saving taxpayers money. True fiscal conservatives should be concerned about the highly-paid, taxpayer-supported bureaucracy of corporate executives that has been created in the past couple of decades as a result of the unchecked privatization of public functions and services at all levels of government.
chris-rich says
You rabble rouse the disgruntled into blaming government to create new niches for service businesses with easy government contracts at federal, state and local levels.
Since the contract budgets are leveled based on public costs with a bit of a break it provides substantial incentive to cut corners and cheat.
SomervilleTom says
“Smaller government” generally means slashing government goods and services to the 99% (including things like R&D spending and infrastructure) using the demonstrably self-defeating “austerity” narrative.
The actual impact is to suck even more wealth out of the 99% (because they then have pay for those same goods and services) so that it may be redistributed to the very wealthy (such as T-Bill holders).
The right LOVES “redistribution of wealth” — redistribution FROM the 99% and TO the 1%.
jconway says
Most conservatives I know sincerely feel that their policies benefit working people more, they just live in ideological bubbles where belief in the efficacy of freer markets is self explanatory even if it fails to hold up to even cursory examination. The limitlessness of economic growth without government intervention and the limitlessness of American military power without domestic political restraints are far more dangerous and more common fallacies on the right than any of their views on social policies. Most social conservative I know are in fact, quite economically leftist (even if they can’t admit it).
The conservative friends I made at U Chicago are far more dangerous than the ones being trained at Bob Jones, who will rise about as high as gadfly House member. It’s the ones in the liberal elitist institutions that will lead think tanks, devise the next generation of foolish warfare, and reform Welfare reform to make it even more regressive. And they have as much influence over the elites in the Democratic party as they do in the GOP.
chris-rich says
But Charlie Baker is more subtle.
And the local ward heeler caucus for the Democratic Party here has essentially been reduced to internalizing Grover Norquist out of a kind of cowardice and incapacity while flailing along with symbolic things and posturings.
The election of Elizabeth Warren is like some minor miracle partly explained by the revealed hollowness of Lord Staplecrotch McBarnjacket once he settled into the senate.
jconway says
It works perfectly fine in Europe and Asia for things like public transit. This is due to a much stronger sense of social responsibility, stronger public oversight, and a focus on prioritizing service over profit.
Bob Neer likes pointing to the Hong Kong transit management company as a model, and it is quite a laudable model.
But in the US private equity firms like Morgan Stanley would manage a shell company to manage the transit and squeeze more and more profits out of less and less service and infrastructure. Just as they already have with the Chicago parking meters. Rick Pearlstein has a great piece on why privatization utterly failed any of the policy objective its boosters had in Chicago.
scott12mass says
Why don’t we just cut the cost of prison. Have the prisoners grow their own food, with the excess going to food banks. A chicken in every cell could be a new slogan. They can be put to work repairing/painting infrastructure, of course the cushy sign painting jobs at the Mass Pike might disappear. You insult honest working people when you say the poor have two choices, prison or welfare.
kbusch says
This diary lacks any direct quotes and it’s been a while since Weld was governor. Who, pray, are we inveighing against? For example, if it were about Andrew Cuomo, maybe there’d be some there there.
However fantasy fiscal conservatives on whom we can project whatever beliefs and positions we most ardently oppose make too easy a target.
chris-rich says
And that’ll work for adding to general discourse.