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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

We have a spending problem, not an income problem. Taking more of people’s money isn’t going to solve the core problem that our spending needs serious cuts. You think your political opponents are bad faith actors because you’ve never actually listened to their core beliefs and only know about them through a lense painted by their opposition who favor bigger government.

Conservatives want the government cut down significantly, not to find creative ways to get more money.

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If they want to cut the spending, then they have to actually cut the spending. Cutting the revenue-generating portion of the government doesn't reduce spending, outside of the comparatively trivial sum spent on revenue collection.

Actually cutting spending is hard. It's easy to decry the overall number, but you have to cut actual programs. The vast majority of it goes to things like social security, medicare, and the military -- things people are reluctant to cut. Of what's left, it's a lot harder to find "waste" than people think. At most they zero in on programs that matter a lot to other people... and comprise a trivial fraction of the overall budget.

The budget is big because people want it to be big. Actually reducing the size of it is hard. Meantime, there is zero reason why we should allow people to break the law to avoid paying for the money that Congress appropriates.

Perhaps we can derive the core beliefs of the Republican party from their 2020 platform. Given that that is how political parties typically express such things, it seems reasonable.

The joke here being that they didn't have a 2020 platform.

“RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”

https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_202...

Strictly, that meant that the 2016 platform remained in force, and they blamed the inability to derive a new one on COVID. But it doesn't speak particularly well of them not to be seriously considering the fundamental statement of what it is the party wants to do.

I'm gonna have to push back a bit on that.

I've had major frustrations precisely because conservatives do not cut down on the government when they finally get elected. Spending always goes up.

What we have, at least in the US, are tax and spend big "liberals" on one side. And don't tax, but spend even bigger anyway "conservatives" on the other.

Please don't try to sell us on the myth of conservatives being good financial stewards because the recent historical data clearly bears all that out to be nonsense. There is currently no option in the US for you to vote for if you believe we need, for instance, a drawdown in spending.

Yeah you’re right that when it comes to execution the actual cutting of programs rarely happens. This past year has been the first time we’ve seen a GOP that’s actually forcing cuts in my lifetime. It’s also worth noting this has been at the behest of a minority of the party and that most of them do seem okay with the status quo. Still these politicians are elected on platforms of doing this it’s just that

A. A lot of them definitely are grifters

B. The ones that aren’t have to deal with political realities that make slashing income easier than slashing spending.

They are bad faith actors. They pass no legislation to reduce spending, in fact, they just keep spending more and more. You don't buy a $1M house and then make payments like it was $500K, that's just flat out stupid.

> want the government cut down significantly

Yet another claim trivially refuted by actions.

We should stop repeating transparently bogus claims like this.

You should stop thinking your partisan view points are facts. This is the core doctrine of every American conservative, it isn’t a refutable claim. You can make the case that the elected politicians are corrupt and do not follow through on promises, in which case you won’t find many conservatives that disagree.

It is a refutable claim. Those voters continue to vote the same people in. We can derive from their action, that politicians not reducing spending isn’t a concern they hold highly.

No you can derive that they find those politicians better than the alternative and nothing more. Republicans not cutting spending as voters would like isn’t going to make them democrats no matter how much you’d like that to be the case.

The fact is they have been very successful at stopping democratic policy over the years and just this year they have forced concessions on spending out of democrats, including the president after he stated that wouldn’t happen.

If the dem party kept saying they were pro-choice but then started filling seats with mostly pro-life judges, they would lose voters. Some things are a bridge too far for people. Republican voters don’t think spending is an important enough issue to put their foot down and say enough is enough.

When a political party frightens the public about deficit spending and unsustainable debt while that party is out of power, and then when the party is in power they cut taxes for the wealthy while increasing spending, it's easy to infer that their claims of fiscal responsibility were just a ruse to gain power.

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