Reply #98: I think if you'll look more closely

[Mairead]

you'll find I'm not.

You say you're a fiscal conservative. Okay, what does that translate to in the particular areas I list below?

Do you support the insanely high (at least $400G p.a.) military-industrial budget? If so, why? If not, why, and how much don't you support it?

Ditto the murderous, ineffective drugs war and the prison-industrial budget (also around $400G, but very possibly more all taken together).

Ditto keeping corporate hands in our pockets on healthcare (about 18% of $2T, I think) and public services.

Ditto the current structure of taxation (you mention cigs and booze, but I'm talking about the big ones--taxation on labor vs coupon-clipping, and on big salaries vs small).

Where are you on public services (by which I mean services that are used universally or nearly so, such as water, energy, transportation, etc.)? Should they be run for public profit or private profit, and why?


My problem is not with just anything called 'fiscal conservative' but, as I've said repeatedly here, with the fact that it's used as a coded term for pro-elite/anti-working-people politics. No self-described 'fiscal conservative' in the past 25 years, minimum, has left office with the poor better off and the wealthy elites worse off. Not one. None. That, to me, is the bottom line: who pays, who is paid.

So when I say that 'fiscal conservative' means 'pro-elite and anti-poor', I'm not talking about the nominal definition, or the abstract, or the 'could be's, I'm talking about what's true in net practice.

If Dennis Kucinich announced for a balanced budget and a constitutional amendment that requires unbalanced budgets to come out of congressional pockets first, the pockets of the wealthiest second, and the pockets of working people last, I'd call him a 'fiscal conservative'...but everyone else (hyperbolically speaking) would call him a commie, monster, baby-killer, and probably a perv who rapes immature goats, because balancing the budget on the backs of the elites is not what 'fiscal conservative' is allowed to mean in practice.

(edit: clarified my 'everyone else', since I can't possibly be certain that absolutely every other living soul would take the stance I allegedly impute to them.)