poll on your political ideology

[JayhawkSD]

7. Undefined, but fiscally responsible liberal perhaps

I tend to be socially liberal, with traces of libertarian perhaps. I favor a decent social safety net, but believe that other than that government should not intrude in our personal lives. Government should regulate business sufficiently to assure that competition is maintained, or that when it cannot be that the public interest is paramount. I oppose federal defecits under normal conditions, but am sufficiently Keynesian to favor stimulus spending in economic hard times provided that government debt is reduced in economic good times.

I think modern economic talk, with its blather about how a one-year butget will save so much money in ten years, how deficits only matter as a percentage of GDP, how governments never repay debt but allow it to somehow magically disappear due to inflation, and how a nation can become more wealthy by taking money out of its left pocket and putting it in its right pocket are utter nonsense.

A one-year budget will only save money for one year, debt matters as a percentage of your income and not as a percentage of what your employer spends, inflation punishes workers and poor people more than it rewards debtors, and there are reasons for taking money from one taxpayer and giving it to another but it is a stopgap measure and does not improve the overall economy in real terms.