@Jaxk “The whole problem with ‘socially liberal and fiscally conservative’ is that once you start piling on spending on social programs, you’ve blown the budget and fiscal conservatism is gone.”
I consider myself socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I view government spending like a company might view R&D. In many cases, spending yields a big return down the road. Spend money on government research and we get things like the Internet as a result. Some programs are boated bureaucracies, and they need to be either cut and replaced with effective solutions or reorganized.
For example, I’d much rather use my tax dollars to pay for a first rate education and after school programs for an impoverished inner city kid than spend a lifetime of tax dollars keeping him in prison for the next 70 years at tens of thousands per year, not to mention the loss to society that he could have contributed (including his tax revenues) plus (assuming he murdered someone) the loss of productivity of the person he murdered. Do a cost/benefit analysis on increasing his access to education and after school programs and choose what makes the most fiscal sense. In my mind, that’s a no-brainer, and the truly “conservative” thing to do is to support the “big government” programs.
If the programs aren’t having the intended effect, or are spending money frivolously then we should be ruthless about improving the programs, but not abandon the mission and decide to build more prisons instead. It should primarily focus on the return on investment. I’d like to see the Government Accountability Office expand and become more ruthless with finding waste/fraud/abuse and help eliminate redundancy and inefficiency in our system.
I also think it’s not fiscally conservative to allow companies to externalize their costs onto the public. Measures like carbon taxes allow for companies to offset the costs they bring to bear on the taxpayer. If you look at how expensive climate change has been to the American taxpayer (droughts, extreme storms, destruction of fish), it’s not only rational to force companies to pay for their expenses, but it is fiscally conservative for them to do so.