the reason I know “fiscal conservatism” isn’t real is that most fiscal conservatives, when you explain this to them, are willing to pay extra just so people who don’t “deserve” a benefit don’t get it
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My boomer mom, raised Lutheran, has a strange obsession with who “deserves” this benefit or that. Can’t talk her out of it, even when I point out that providing blanket benefits is faster and less expensive.
aug 30, 2025, 3:47 pm • 9 0 • view
"Fiscal conservativism" has always been code for "no money for black people." They have a lot of codes for that, actually.
aug 30, 2025, 4:46 pm • 10 0 • view
Means testing is just bad. I am done pretending that it's in good faith, when the primary purpose is to give a salve to people who could have benefited in the past, and to make up a strawman to attack.
aug 30, 2025, 3:48 pm • 5 0 • view
Fiscal conservatism works the same as the rest of conservatism: the conservation refers to hierarchies, not resources.
aug 30, 2025, 3:41 pm • 84 11 • view
Yep, their identities are invested in having hierarchies that give them the status of "righteous worthy," regardless of their income. When you say, "pay/house/help everyone, it's cheaper," you're taking away their status as righteous worthy. W/out it, what are they? They'd rather die.
aug 30, 2025, 4:37 pm • 28 2 • view
It’s so trivial though! It means nothing. But maybe I don’t get hierarchies.
aug 30, 2025, 4:46 pm • 7 0 • view
A lot of it in U.S. has to do w/ the type of churches & the communities you're in from them, which run whole towns in more rural parts. You're in or you're out. If you're in a dominant group (such as white,) you have cultural rep advantages & better economic ops. They get to be the good lordlings.
aug 30, 2025, 5:02 pm • 10 0 • view
This friend of mine has to work for racists. She’s like a white person whisperer. She has zero animosity or resentment for racists. She just accepts them as they are. This is how she survived I guess? But their reasoning doesn’t change? She has universal love for all. They stay just as racist.
aug 30, 2025, 5:11 pm • 8 0 • view
Bc their lordling status isn't being challenged. We're all raised in these hierarchies & marginalized folk have to deal w/ not setting us off in the day to day. "Fiscal conservatives" see themselves as practical, beneficent lordlings - still bigots but they're not the directly violent 1's, you see.
aug 30, 2025, 5:26 pm • 8 0 • view
For sure when you look from a distance you think ‘how do you wallow in the lies like that…you must know…’ But when you get close you see the whole mental architecture that they use to uphold it and it’s very chilling. The emotional capacities are so stunted. Inner humanity has been damaged. Scary.
aug 30, 2025, 5:31 pm • 7 0 • view
Yes, but it's also all of us. Our society taught us & it's very easy to forget & pull rank w/ those who are marginalized to your lordling status. Bc we see it as our worthiness as individuals rather than a cultural rep that's handed to us. To give it up takes conscious effort. RW'ers are too scared.
aug 30, 2025, 5:38 pm • 3 0 • view
It’s true. You have to examine situations and even your own mind all the time to see ways that you are playing into it and reproducing it— and figure out methods to disrupt it. It’s very insidious. But many cultural systems have NO TOOLS for this. They’re designed to prevent that. Disheartening.
aug 30, 2025, 5:43 pm • 3 0 • view
An example—it’s better than nothing!—is that I know a Black woman in the South who lives next door to a huge racist. He saw her struggling so started coming over to fix things in her yard! Then down all his flags. (She didn’t ask he just did it.) She became an ‘us’ to him. He won’t truly change tho
aug 30, 2025, 5:08 pm • 1 0 • view
For him, bc he's white, he's inherently superior, good, meritorious, etc. (cultural rep) & Black folk are inherently inferior, lazy, bad, etc. (marginalized peasant). But there can be good peasants, partial exceptions. She's not "us", but she's not quite "them" & he can help her as a neighbor.
aug 30, 2025, 5:13 pm • 3 0 • view
I know racist minds have been destroyed by racism on one level but seeing it close up the way she has gotten me to do—I just feel so desperate for this whole worldview to end forever. Reconstruction was our chance but we have to do it. How anyone can want that ‘culture’ to survive…it’s maddening.
aug 30, 2025, 5:23 pm • 1 0 • view
Yes, I guess that’s it. The South is a trip. She is 82. You would not believe the intimacy between her and these racists. And she knows what racism is, she has a very good analysis. She knows just how they are. They are like children to her, though. They need her to be kind so she is kind.
aug 30, 2025, 5:20 pm • 1 0 • view
But if you help all Black folk, as part of helping everyone, then you're getting rid of "us" as the superior righteous worthy; you're changing the social order, removing the hierarchies that give him status & power, elevating inferiors as equal, pointing out his status as righteous worthy was false.
aug 30, 2025, 5:18 pm • 3 0 • view
Right. It HAS to end. It’s like a horror movie but with millions of people.
aug 30, 2025, 5:24 pm • 1 0 • view
True. Many years I spent trying to understand these people. The best insight someone gave me was EXACTLY that. It’s all ‘us v. them.’ In puzzling about the ludicrous tendency for inconsistency—because they DO use moral ideas— I hadn’t realized that was their moral framework. Racism is the cause.
aug 30, 2025, 5:05 pm • 2 0 • view
I often have this argument with people regarding homelessness. It would be way cheaper just to house people, and far more likely to lead to people getting their lives back together. Instead we pay more to house people in hospitals or prison.
aug 30, 2025, 4:10 pm • 6 1 • view
They are as real as deficit hawks.
aug 31, 2025, 8:33 am • 1 0 • view
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aug 30, 2025, 4:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Yes, a lot of things they hate will save money.
aug 30, 2025, 4:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Sometimes I think we'd be better off to call ourselves pragmatists rather than liberals or progressives. That was always my critique of the GOP before it became completely batshit. It was that they always put ideology ahead of everything, including pragmatism. Sure, in an ideal world everyone would
aug 30, 2025, 10:42 pm • 0 0 • view
be able to take care of all of their own needs. We don't live in that world. That world does not exist. We need to address problems for the world we live in, not the ideal one in your head.
aug 30, 2025, 10:43 pm • 0 0 • view
I don't think people are naturally pragmatists. I don't care that feeding the hungry and housing the homeless is cheaper, I care that it's right. And I don't want policy to change if later grinding up the homeless to feed the hungry becomes cheaper.
aug 31, 2025, 11:39 am • 0 0 • view
Not all people are you. Some of us are naturally pragmatists. Republicans like to pretend that they are, though they aren't. Which is why I like to point out to them that they aren't, because generally, they don't give a shit about ethics or morality.
aug 31, 2025, 2:20 pm • 0 0 • view
That sooner people understand that conservatives are, for the most part, bad, cruel people and not folks with legitimate concerns about spending, the better.
aug 30, 2025, 3:40 pm • 30 1 • view
JK Galbraith: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
aug 30, 2025, 4:50 pm • 15 0 • view
I'm obsessed with this issue and talk about it to anyone who will listen. We spend millions of dollars just to make sure that if someone's income went up by $5, they no longer receive benefits.
aug 30, 2025, 4:10 pm • 3 0 • view
Here in the UK it’s been proven time and time again that reviews of PIP (Personal Independent Payment) claiments cost way more money than they save. Benefit fraud is so low it’s virtually non existent, but the media are always trotting out some goober who claims, but has been filmed lifting weights
aug 31, 2025, 9:50 am • 1 0 • view
Absolutely the case. Even the people who administer social safety net programs are terrified that they might accidentally help someone too much. It's an endemic monomania.
aug 30, 2025, 9:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Fiscal conservatism is really just petty meanness masquerading as responsibility. They're preserving a social pecking order, not saving money. The pecking order is ultimately far more costly than egalitarian policy, but egalitarianism doesn't make them feel superior.
aug 30, 2025, 9:57 pm • 4 0 • view
I used to reflexively say I was “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” but I got cured of that by the 2009 healthcare debates, like oh you mean nationalized care actually SAVES money, seems like a no-brainer to do that then
aug 31, 2025, 4:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Americans by and large are more concerned with what is "fair" rather than what is "efficient".
aug 30, 2025, 3:50 pm • 2 0 • view
There was some society-modeling work I saw a few years ago that found cooperative societies “won” but were size limited. However, they could be larger by including “punishers” (peeps who penalized bad actors at large personal cost).
aug 30, 2025, 3:47 pm • 2 0 • view
There is some evidence for a genetic component to conservatism— now maladaptive, I would say (our comms make our societies “smaller”).
aug 30, 2025, 3:50 pm • 3 0 • view
You’re saying the cruelty is the point.
aug 30, 2025, 5:07 pm • 0 0 • view
"Fiscal conservatives" would rather house people in the most expensive way possible (jail) rather than just give them a place to live.
aug 30, 2025, 3:50 pm • 21 2 • view
Its just puritanism by another name! Oh they didnt work hard enough? DENIED!!!!
aug 30, 2025, 7:10 pm • 0 0 • view
God, yes - the yawning horror of someone getting something, while not being perfect in every way by MY personal measure.
aug 30, 2025, 4:28 pm • 1 0 • view
The cruelty is the point.
aug 30, 2025, 5:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Hell, they’re willing to pay an additional marketing fee to promote imaginary talking points supporting it. All out of spite for their fellow man
aug 31, 2025, 12:24 am • 0 0 • view
There is only one good kind of means testing, and that is progressive taxation.
aug 30, 2025, 3:55 pm • 9 0 • view
Two types of people in this world. When someone comes up to them asking for help, the first says “how can I help?” and the second says “do you really need/deserve my help?”
aug 30, 2025, 3:49 pm • 13 0 • view
I sometimes wonder if this is due to the inability to understand or accept contingency/arbitrariness. The people who think they ‘earned’ everything but nobody else ‘earned’ anything. Or the people who want to think they are immune from the afflictions of life. Like if you do everything right.
aug 30, 2025, 4:48 pm • 5 0 • view
It’s true even knowing about contingency/arbitrariness might not work…because I always feel guilty things worked out for me and not for so many other people in my family. This was 100% luck. I had better luck. So why do I feel guilty? I can examine it rationally but I still have the feeling.
aug 30, 2025, 4:50 pm • 4 0 • view