View original postView original postView original postOr if you prefer... Fiscal conservatives who are more socially liberally minded. But you know what they say. "Behind every cynic there's a disappointed idealist." Meh. Ideally we have had both but the polarization of politics have gotten quite depressing. Both are wrong, and both are right regarding certain points.
View original postView original postWhen you get right down to most issues are principally moral v moral or moral v cash, guns, abortions, drugs, porn, prostitution, gay rights, etc are mostly moral v moral, whereas military spending, environmentalism, welfare, SS, etc are moral v cash. Moral v moral issue rarely have much to do with each other and moral v cash are mostly about priority and efficiency. Liberal and conservative are pretty vague and silly concepts, depending on who you ask inside the GOP I am a moderate establishment republican or an arch-conservative or libertarian and you'll get that from people who have equal knowledge of my political leanings. Same applies to the left. Most people have a few pet issues and they connect them together into their pet uber-ideology, I count myself lucky to have mostly avoided that trap, mostly because I know there's an alternate Universe nearly identical to ours where pot didn't get banned and right now the Dems are screaming about the republicans "Taking blood money from the NRA, Phillip-Morris, and High Times" and another where the republicans are accusing the left of trying to starve children.
View original postView original postSo no I don't really think a social liberal fiscal hawk is in the cards mostly because the former is something I don't believe exists and the latter is one I view as a matter more associated to how frugal someone is, which really has nothing to do with their abortion or gun stance, but it does have a lot to do with how likely someone is to agree to additional funding for various programs especially those that hinge on giving individuals cash. Your average frugal person if asked to define 'poverty level' is likely to give a lower value than the average person. As long as socially liberal includes, in people's eyes, issues that are more moral v cash as opposed to principally moral v moral, fiscal conservatives are likely to be rarer animals in that group then out. Frugal people usually deny themselves a lot of luxuries and tend to get irritated, unsympathetic, or even outraged by those who don't especially on the taxpayer dime. Forget your wallet or be low on cash some week, go out for dinner with a frugal friend and they don't just order cheap they'll typically get angry if you spend the borrowed cash on steak, even if the amount you borrowed didn't bother them at all and they have no doubt you're good for it. This is a great mindset for people in public office to have, especially with money that isn't theirs, but it doesn't tend to lend itself as readily raising taxes to increase payments to the poor.
View original postView original postIf you redefine social liberal to be only those things which are moral v moral issues, then yeah, it can happen and probably would. We've had times like that before, it will probably happen again.
View original postI define myself as a social liberal because that's where my opinions lie on the spectrum. and because it's easier to say than a long, drawn-out discussion on each issue. I think that I am fiscally liberal to a certain extent because of what you said above. Did you mean to equate frugality with being fiscally responsible? Because being a tightwad and managing money properly are two different things. As per possessions, I'm a bit of a minimalist, but not completely. I have no debt. No mortgage, no student loans, no credit card bill. If i dont have the money for something, I save up for it or don't buy it. When we do house repairs we do one project at a time, when most people (republicans included) would just take out a loan and have the whole thing fixed at once. Believe me, sometimes I really wish we had. : P However, if I have enough money to remodel the kitchen, and money to eat a certain caliber of food, other consumables, money to put towards savings... Then if I had sufficient funds, I would have no problem putting that money towards a food bank that also gives produce and teaches cooking skills. No, not one that simply hands out food.
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 r 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.
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'
