Of a Newt led congress that fought Clinton tooth and nail on spending.

It seemed once Newt & Clinton were gone, that same congress decided to spend money like a drunken monkey.

It’s like obscenity.

I know it when I see it.

Unlike obscenity, it has been quite a long time since I’ve seen it.

because we are headed for a deep recession. But runaway spending, subsidies for corporations, and ongoing market manipulations by government certainly have no part of a conservative philosophy.

As for the social issues, only three things should be a part of our national platform,
(1) non-activist judges
(2) respect for human life here and abroad
(3) Let the states decide most of the social issues for themselves, you know its in the ninth and tenth amendments.

If anyone wants more than that we should respectfully say to them, No, right now we have to focus on these issues to defeat the Democrats.

that there are really a few different things to argue about, and all have some claim to at least part of the label ‘fiscal conservative’ but many people who claim the label don’t share all of them. I can see at least three separate issues. I’d label them ‘fiscal restraint’, ‘size of government’ and ‘use of tax policy’.

Fiscal restraint is, simply put, keeping within a budget, and not spending more than you bring in. In the example above, candidate A fails this test and candidate B does not.

Size of government is self-explanatory. In the example above, candidate B is clearly less fiscally conservative than candidate A.

The third leg to me is the use of tax policy to achieve ends other than funding the government, and to me it’s actually more important than the other two, but it’s talked about less. To explain what I mean, consider the Laffer curve. It tells us that for any given amount of revenue except at the very peak of the curve there are two different tax rates which will achieve the same amount of income to the government. A fiscal conservative under this leg would always, without fail, choose the lower tax rate. Anyone who would choose a different rate under any circumstances fails this test. While politicians rarely talk about the Laffer curve itself, one can listen to their discussions on fiscal policy to determine their views. Simply put, if you hear the words “fair”, “fair share”, or their like you’re listening to a politician that, under this leg, is not a fiscal conservative. To me this is almost more important than the total size of government and is definitely more important than the fiscal restraint, because incentives and disincintives both work. If you punish success, then people will be less successful.

Anyone who holds any one of these beliefs can claim some measure of fiscal conservatism, but in my view unless you support all three you’re not going to be a satisfactory candidate for fiscal conservatives across the board. So assuming that the 22 cents on the dollar figure isn’t small enough to be ‘small’ the answer is that neither candidate A nor candidate B is entirely acceptable, and their views on the use of tax policy would quite likely sway me from one to the other, but either deserves support against a candidate C who wants to spend 50 cents and only tax 45.

So looking back at the last election we had one candidate (Obama) who fails all 3 tests miserably, against a second candidate (McCain) who was solid on one leg, semi-ok on the second one, and bad on the third. The support each candidate got seems fairly responsive on that.

Fiscal Conservatism, to me, means fiscal responsibility.

I’m guessing that these economic conservatives who were opposed to the Bush tax cuts are deficit hawks, like myself. Several of these GOPers, mostly senators, who balked at the early 2000s tax cuts are gone. Chafee, etc. My senator, Voinovich, was one of them.
It just seems like common sense that if we are cutting the amount of revenue coming in, that we should make corresponding cuts in the amount of money we are spending. Deficits do matter. They have a long-term effect on inflationary pressure and can force the hand of future administrations in passing tax cuts, despite the party affiliation.
What happened to those in the GOP who pushed for a balanced budget? McCain’s constant call for tax cuts was nice, but it seemed unrealistic with massive budgetary cuts, including defense and homeland security cuts, along with social programs.
Here’s to a return of budget hawks in both parties. The current economic problems will seem minor to the wave of inflation we are facing in the coming years when the current deficit catches up with us.

I disagree. No amount of debt is healthy. Debt is bad. Period.

Let’s look at what believing in debt has cost us. We take the SS payments and issue debt. We spend the money evey year. Now that SS is going to go thru a hard time we do not have the money to pay for it. We only have the debt.

You can not cut taxes if you have debt because those taxes can be argued for paying off the debt. If you can not cut taxes bny a large enough % you can not encourge growth.

No debt is not and never will be good. It robs you of choices. It makes you a slave to the lender.

It gives the false impression that gov can do everything and anything. Simple by borrowing more.

If gov was not allow to go into debt most of the programs would be voted down becaus eof lack of funding. Debt gives Congress a green light to spend without regards to having to raise taxes. If every new program required a raise in taxes most new programs would not go thru.

No debt means more freedom individually and nationally.

I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal, voting for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. To me, fiscal conservative means you live within your means. Driving up government debt is the worst kind of income redistribution- stealing money from future taxpayers so we don’t have to pay now. My diary from a month ago discusses exactly that.

the press undermined the Republican ticket this year. Sarah Palin is a fiscal conservative, she is a budget slasher and a reformer. But all you heard about on the news was that she kills animals, is a religious extremist and likes plumbers.

I didn’t know jack about Palin’s personal life before the election. But I wanted her as VP because of her fiscal conservatism and how much of a DC outsider and anti-bureaucrat she was.

We’ve been hearing for years that the future of the GOP depends on ditching the cultural issues and taking the Christie Todd Whitman path to the huge numbers of voters who would vote Republican but are scared of pro-lifers.

Now, obviously these people exist, as we can witness in the comments, and there is much to be said for using different strategies for different regions, for building coalitions where you can and not pushing people away by demanding they be all-or-nothing on every issue.

However, for whatever reason, fiscal conservatism and social conservatism are strongly correlated. The old Northeastern liberal Republicans are usually not only liberal on abortion, but to the left of the party on everything else as well. While they see themselves as right of the Democrats, they basically agree with the left’s view that strongly-voiced opposition to “progress” (as defined by they left) is divisive, so they are distressed not only by the GOP’s opposition to abortion but to its opposition to the left across the board.

Likewise, on the other side, to the upper-middle-class folks David Frum would have us reach out for, social conservatism is only one part of their disgust with the GOP. All the upper-middle-class metropolitan whites I know buy the whole Obama package: socialized medicine, dreamland-can’t-we-all-just-talk-this-thing-out foreign policy, hope-and-change, affirmative action, environmentalism etc. If all of that means higher taxes and slower income growth for them, they view it as fitting penance for their prosperity.

Perhaps social conservatism is what is most foreign about the GOP to them, but they tend to view the whole thing as of a piece: the religious right, the Jewish neocons and big oil are all a tightly run conspiracy to destroy the planet, screw over the poor and make war on people who aren’t white–and they oppose all these things. If anything, (being well-trained by their Marxist professors) they view religion and morality as dependent variables of economic factors and power struggles (“reality”) or “distractions” that keep people from voting for their true interests (namely, the wealth-redistribution programs of the left).

The primary exception to this rule is not wealthy educated white people who like market economics but don’t like religion, but minorities and poor who vote Democrat but are to the right of their party on social issues. What Buckley wrote in God and Man at Yale remains true today, if not more so: the educational system that turns people away from traditional religion and morality is just as if not even more adamantly opposed to capitalism.

I don’t know what part of the Democratic coalition the GOP needs to peel off if it is to beat the demographic trends that seem to spell its doom, but I don’t think moving leftward on social issues will get us very far among secular educated upper-middle-class whites.