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I'm not unsympathetic, but the problem of the Fiscal Responsibility Party building up a treasure chest through being harsh and unpopular and then the Gibs Party looting it is a real issue. What's your proposed solution, beyond restricting the electorate or just accepting your role as Nasty Daddy and watching the Gibs Party eat your work every time?
We had the same problem in the UK with the old Tory party and Labour, and getting fed up with that is one reason why Reform is doing so well at the moment.
This particular treasure chest was last filled during a rather popular administration. “A rising tide” and all that. We still teach Keynesian economics in high school; the government is expected to run a surplus in good times and mitigate the bad ones with deficit spending.
That cycle has been more or less pretextual since 2008. The opposition got hijacked by a populist before they could really pull back on spending, and the next crisis hit right before an election. I suspect we can still put the toothpaste back in the tube, but it would take a level of economic optimism which hasn’t yet appeared.
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Fiscal responsibility was an election winning platform in both the 90s and in 2010. The idea that Republicans save and the Democrats spend it all to win all the elections is not accurate.
No, if that were true then Republicans would never be in power to save. But it does seem true that conservative parties get in and, let us say, don't make many friends and then the left splurges it on clients. My taxes are high and my country is full of leechers and immigrants, and the conservatives were in power on a manifesto of austerity for most of that time.
There's a difference between winning an election on a platform (which demonstrates some baseline level of popularity) and actually pushing it through, and then sustaining it in the long term. So yeah, Republicans might not have gotten long-term victories on the issue in 2010, but it was still a priority that some voters were willing to push for.
And you don't have to go that far back in time to find more unconditional fiscal health. The US was fine in the 1970s for instance.
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