Paying With Fairy Dust

[phantom power]

Over at Salon John Sides has posted a graph illustrating an important point about what someone has dubbed the "conflicted conservatives," people who say they believe in cutting go government spending but who can't name a program they would cut.



I think calling them conflicted is being a little bit too polite. The proper term for these people is "free lunch" conservatives. The one thing these people really care about is taxes, which they think are evil and believe they should never have to pay. They actually like the spending on programs from which they all benefit, which is why they are so gleeful about these "fleecing of America" earmark stories --- there's some spending which clearly benefits someone else and so it is safe to call it "wasteful."

Maybe we could be a bit more polite and just call them "magical thinking" conservatives, but "conflicted" would imply that they feel some sort of dissonance, and it's quite clear that they do not. They truly believe that government should provide all the services they use but that nobody should have to pay any taxes to support it.

I believe it's the central economic difference between liberals and conservatives. We all like the welfare state and want more of it. They just think it should be paid for with fairy dust and we think progressive taxation is the more logical choice. Sadly, the political system has chosen to go with fairy dust. It's more marketable.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/paying-with-fairy-dust-by-digby-over-at.html

[JHB]

1. Part of it is that, another part is...

...a highly distorted notion of how much money goes to particular programs, and of how much (and where) waste there is.

Dating at least back to the Reagan days (and probably farther), in polls asking people "what percent of the federal budget is devoted to ________?", the guessed-at percentages for things like foreign aid, welfare & aid to the poor, research, etc. almost always far exceeded the actual numbers.

As often as not, when you told people the real numbers, they wouldn't believe you and claim you were skewing the numbers in some way (usually while denying that the defense budget did use tricks like that, such as having many nuclear weapons expenses counted under the Energy Dept. budget).

[bemildred]

2. Hmmm, other than TWAT, defense spending doesn't seem to be on that list.

We need to go where the real money is if we want to make a real difference.

[On the Road]

3. Color Me Shocked

that such a small percent of self-described conservatives wanted to cut money for welfare or aid to the poor.

That makes me wonder both about the study and the stereotype of the conservative.

[pscot]

4. More than half

have an unemployed offspring living in their basement. They aren't completely immune to reality.

[upi402]

5. Republican politicians play on the petty nature of humans

Americans fall for the straw man ploy; why should "they" get something if I don't?

Progressives see America as a whole and are able to care about Americans as a community.

[Bigmack]

6. I think one of the underlying pettiness...

is racism. Not "Hang the n---ers!" racism, but the quiet, heartfelt racism so common in this country.

When some people hear "welfare", they have a mental picture of a promiscuous black woman having kid after kid and soaking up the taxpayers' money.

When some people hear "child care" they see that black woman again, only now she's dumping her kids - at taxpayer expense - so she can smoke crack and service her Johns.

Their own lives... their own kids' lives? Well, that's not welfare or child care, that's just "helping us deserving people out a little". Deserving, of course, meaning white.

[ixion]

7. All the services that should be provided because of taxes

the obvious choice is to cut military spending, but O My, that would offend the MIC. :grr: