Fiscal Conservative, social Liberal

[PETRUS]

7. I like where you're coming from, but I'd tweak your definition somewhat.

A quote from Joe Firestone of neweconomicperspectives.org will do:

"Fiscal responsibility is assessing fiscal policy against its projected impacts on society and democracy. It is not about projecting its impact on the levels of the deficit, the debt, and the debt-to-GDP ratio."

We have a crisis of unemployment and poverty NOW.

As Dean Baker put it in an op-ed this morning:

"The debate around the budget is getting ever further removed from reality. As every budget expert knows, the reason that we have seen large budget deficits in the last five years is that the economy plunged following the collapse of the housing bubble. This collapse cost us more than $600 billion in annual construction demand and more than $500 billion in annual consumption demand.

This lost demand gave us large deficits because it led to plunging tax collections and more spending on programs like unemployment insurance. We deliberately raised deficits by roughly $300 billion annually in 2009 and 2010 with the stimulus package.

These deficits were supporting the economy, making up for the loss of private sector demand. They took the deficit from a very modest 1.2 percent of GDP in 2007 to a peak of more than 9 percent of GDP in 2009.

Unfortunately, rather than deal with the reality – that we need deficits to sustain demand in a context where the private sector will not do it – the politicians in Washington have gotten hysterical. This is like complaining about our use of water when the school is on fire with the kids still inside."