I am not making a blanket statement about fiscal responsibility and frugality, I myself am usually considered to have the former and as with most things, on the latter it varies a lot, I can be rather lavish with my funds but at the same time will balk at buying a cup of coffee or premade meals on the grounds that coffee is very cheap and cooking from scratch is cheaper and I suppose because I like cooking. I'm making a generalized statement that a disproportionate number of people we'd call fiscally responsible are frugal, essentially that if you pick a hundred random people and have them judged by one group for 'twenty most frugal' and by another the 'twenty most fiscally responsible' that the list is going to have a lot more overlap than random odds dictate, that is to say, I would expect the lists to match but random odds would have 4 people on both and I'd expect the actual value to be significantly higher.

The second half of that is that frugal person are hardly scrooges but are generally going to have a lower bar for wealth. using another made up example, if I take those hundred people from above and have them individually review suggested cost of living to work out welfare values and write down their figures, if the average for the 100 was say, $1000 a month, I would expect the average for 20 'frugals' to be less than $1000. So I simply concluding that in a pre-existing system paying out X in assistance where baout half think it should be raised and half lowered are unchanged, odds are more than half of 'frugal persons' will be in the latter camp and thus more than half of the fiscally responsible. That isn't meant to be 'all', a super-majority, or even an comment that they are right.

The last aspect of that being that I wouldn't expect moral v moral issue to hinge much on frugality except from secondary factors, e.g. someone who has become republican because they are a fiscal hawk sort is likely to pickup our moral v moral stances and vice-versa, via association rather than it having much to do with frugality..

View original postCan you tell I like to oversimplify? . I think there's the true difference.

I usually say republican or conservative to save time too, but merely as a quick abridged remark that 'isn't exactly wrong'