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What are the differences in fiscal policy between replublicans and democrats?

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ryan

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To make this less confusing for me, let's just stick with U.S. republicanism (R) vs democratic principles (D) (although, if you want to expand on your country's politics you are more than welcome)

I am a little unsure about what primal elements of fiscal policies of R vs D that manifest to what the GOP wants vs DP (Democratic Party) such as business vs civilian taxes.

6 Questions: (Answer any or all)

1) Am I correct by saying that republicans generally want less taxes on business and more taxes on workers? 2) If yes, is this because republicans have a different "fiscal philosophy" than democrats such as trickle down economics? 3) And why is this for republicanism?

4) Are democrats typical more interested in economic equality? 5) If yes, is this a necessary intrinsic "left" element to keep there from being a present day French-type revolution?

I bring up the French Revolution because the king's councel to his left seemed to be in a little more support for equality after the revolution. 6) Was this left counsel installed mostly due to a lesson learnt from the revolution?

Please help, any details or good references that you want to add will be greatly appreciated.
 
ryan said:
To make this less confusing for me, let's just stick with U.S. republicanism (R) vs democratic principles (D)
Click to expand...
For this question we need to distinguish between R & D grass roots on the one hand and R & D officials on the other. As a rule, whether R or D, the officials either have no principles or else the R ones' only observable principle is to prevent the D ones from ruining the country, and the D ones' only observable principle is to prevent the R ones from ruining the country. Boring. So let's focus on the grass roots.

6 Questions: (Answer any or all)

1) Am I correct by saying that republicans generally want less taxes on business and more taxes on workers? 2) If yes, is this because republicans have a different "fiscal philosophy" than democrats such as trickle down economics? 3) And why is this for republicanism?

4) Are democrats typical more interested in economic equality? 5) If yes, is this a necessary intrinsic "left" element to keep there from being a present day French-type revolution?

I bring up the French Revolution because the king's councel to his left seemed to be in a little more support for equality after the revolution. 6) Was this left counsel installed mostly due to a lesson learnt from the revolution?

Please help, any details or good references that you want to add will be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

1. Republicans generally want less taxes on business and less taxes on workers.

2 & 3. NA

4. Yes.

5. No. They want it for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

6. I don't think so; but which post-revolution king are you talking about? Louis XVIII seems to have been making it up as he went along; Louis Philippe seems to have believed at least theoretically in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; both of them were more controlled by events than in control of them.

The chief underlying reason for most of the endless specific differences -- not just in fiscal policy but in policy preferences in general -- between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, conservatives and progressives, call them what you please, appears to be that conservatives typically think like farmers and progressives typically think like hunter-gatherers. We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that wired our brains to intuitively know what it takes to survive by foraging, struggling with ten thousand years of experience that taught our cultures to counter-intuitively know what it takes to survive by growing our own food. Consequently, for ten thousand years, wherever farmers and hunter-gatherers lived side by side, their different understandings of how people ought to live have created irreconcilable conflicts, each community regarding the other as a gang of wrongdoers. Conservatives vs. progressives is just history repeating itself.
 
Bomb#20 said:
6 Questions: (Answer any or all)

1) Am I correct by saying that republicans generally want less taxes on business and more taxes on workers? 2) If yes, is this because republicans have a different "fiscal philosophy" than democrats such as trickle down economics? 3) And why is this for republicanism?

4) Are democrats typical more interested in economic equality? 5) If yes, is this a necessary intrinsic "left" element to keep there from being a present day French-type revolution?

I bring up the French Revolution because the king's councel to his left seemed to be in a little more support for equality after the revolution. 6) Was this left counsel installed mostly due to a lesson learnt from the revolution?

Please help, any details or good references that you want to add will be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

1. Republicans generally want less taxes on business and less taxes on workers.

2 & 3. NA

4. Yes.

5. No. They want it for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

6. I don't think so; but which post-revolution king are you talking about? Louis XVIII seems to have been making it up as he went along; Louis Philippe seems to have believed at least theoretically in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; both of them were more controlled by events than in control of them.
Click to expand...

I see that Wikipedia says that "Left/Right" was coined during the French Revolution specific to the left or right seating arrangements of the Estates General, Left being for the revolution and Right for the monarchy. I don't remember where I got my information from, but it is probably wrong.

The chief underlying reason for most of the endless specific differences -- not just in fiscal policy but in policy preferences in general -- between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, conservatives and progressives, call them what you please, appears to be that conservatives typically think like farmers and progressives typically think like hunter-gatherers. We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that wired our brains to intuitively know what it takes to survive by foraging, struggling with ten thousand years of experience that taught our cultures to counter-intuitively know what it takes to survive by growing our own food. Consequently, for ten thousand years, wherever farmers and hunter-gatherers lived side by side, their different understandings of how people ought to live have created irreconcilable conflicts, each community regarding the other as a gang of wrongdoers. Conservatives vs. progressives is just history repeating itself.
Click to expand...

So for this last part, would you say it's genetic or how a child is raised?

How do you see farming and hunting/gathering as right and left origins?
 
ryan said:
I see that Wikipedia says that "Left/Right" was coined during the French Revolution specific to the left or right seating arrangements of the Estates General, Left being for the revolution and Right for the monarchy. I don't remember where I got my information from, but it is probably wrong.
Click to expand...
Oh, I see, you must have been talking about Louis XVI part way through the revolution, not one of the kings who came afterwards.

So for this last part, would you say it's genetic or how a child is raised?
Click to expand...
Well, that's a tricky question to settle one way or the other, since most children are raised by their parents, so you're trying to tease apart the effects of two causal factors that usually push in the same direction. But I'd bet it's mostly how a child is raised. Evolution is slow; whether farming or foraging morals prevail in a community has often changed more quickly than a gene's frequency plausibly could.

How do you see farming and hunting/gathering as right and left origins?
Click to expand...
A lot of it comes down to hunter/gatherers needing to pull up stakes and move to a fresh region so often. So it's impractical for them to accumulate enough food to sustain themselves for months. If you acquire more food than you can carry and you stash it some place for the future, you'll have to abandon it when the tribe moves on, and when you all come back in a few years it will have gone bad. It's wasteful. So if at some point you find you have more food than you can eat right away, your food storage technology of choice is to store it in your tribemates' bodies: you share it. You convert your extra calories into other people's good will toward you. Some time later when you find nothing to eat, your tribemates like you and they share with you whatever food they found, so in effect you get your stored calories back. Do this over and over for five hundred thousand years and your species will evolve an emotional feeling that sharing is good and stingily keeping a hoard for the future is bad.

Then farming comes along. The farmers have to hoard food for the future -- they get their food supply once a year, they stash it some place, they eat it over a period of months, and a third of it they never eat at all -- they just ritually bury the extra in the ground in little shallow furrows every spring. The hunter/gatherers see all this, they think the farmers aren't merely loud idiots scaring the game away but are a bunch of crazy wasteful stingy dicks, so they come down during the night and gather the farmers' seed corn to take back to the forest and have a feast. The farmers catch the foragers in the process and kill some of them. Is it any wonder the farmers and the foragers hate each other?

So the foragers have natural short-term "Let's all just share/Don't collect more than you need/Nature will provide" economic ideas spontaneously growing in their brains; the farmers have artificial long-term "Work hard for the future/Nobody gets to touch your stash/Don't eat the seed corn" economic ideas trained into them from childhood. But when all the farming and saving and keeping track of who owns which stash ends up causing some farmers to accumulate a lot more food than others, all those natural "Let's all just share/Don't collect more than you need" intuitions that children were trained to overrule with cultural rules make themselves felt again, and somebody starts demanding that the more successful farmers' harvests be seized and handed over to the less successful farmers. Thus are born the left and the right.

It goes beyond economics. Back when most of the food was shared, it didn't much matter which woman a baby came out of; but when each family kept its own food stash, unwed mothers became a recipe either for starving babies or else for responsible people being made to work to support the babies of irresponsible people. A few generations of that and the farmers started piling rules regulating sex on top of all their rules for regulating eating and work; but the instinct to have sex when and with whom you feel like it remained, and that tension led to yet more within-group political conflict.
 
Bomb#20 said:
Oh, I see, you must have been talking about Louis XVI part way through the revolution, not one of the kings who came afterwards.

So for this last part, would you say it's genetic or how a child is raised?
Click to expand...
Well, that's a tricky question to settle one way or the other, since most children are raised by their parents, so you're trying to tease apart the effects of two causal factors that usually push in the same direction. But I'd bet it's mostly how a child is raised. Evolution is slow; whether farming or foraging morals prevail in a community has often changed more quickly than a gene's frequency plausibly could.
Click to expand...

Yeah I am starting to think that as human behaviors become more and more complex along with such a quick changing environment/world of new options, opportunities, etc. evolution will be less and less relevant.

How do you see farming and hunting/gathering as right and left origins?
Click to expand...
A lot of it comes down to hunter/gatherers needing to pull up stakes and move to a fresh region so often. So it's impractical for them to accumulate enough food to sustain themselves for months. If you acquire more food than you can carry and you stash it some place for the future, you'll have to abandon it when the tribe moves on, and when you all come back in a few years it will have gone bad. It's wasteful. So if at some point you find you have more food than you can eat right away, your food storage technology of choice is to store it in your tribemates' bodies: you share it. You convert your extra calories into other people's good will toward you. Some time later when you find nothing to eat, your tribemates like you and they share with you whatever food they found, so in effect you get your stored calories back. Do this over and over for five hundred thousand years and your species will evolve an emotional feeling that sharing is good and stingily keeping a hoard for the future is bad.

Then farming comes along. The farmers have to hoard food for the future -- they get their food supply once a year, they stash it some place, they eat it over a period of months, and a third of it they never eat at all -- they just ritually bury the extra in the ground in little shallow furrows every spring. The hunter/gatherers see all this, they think the farmers aren't merely loud idiots scaring the game away but are a bunch of crazy wasteful stingy dicks, so they come down during the night and gather the farmers' seed corn to take back to the forest and have a feast. The farmers catch the foragers in the process and kill some of them. Is it any wonder the farmers and the foragers hate each other?

So the foragers have natural short-term "Let's all just share/Don't collect more than you need/Nature will provide" economic ideas spontaneously growing in their brains; the farmers have artificial long-term "Work hard for the future/Nobody gets to touch your stash/Don't eat the seed corn" economic ideas trained into them from childhood. But when all the farming and saving and keeping track of who owns which stash ends up causing some farmers to accumulate a lot more food than others, all those natural "Let's all just share/Don't collect more than you need" intuitions that children were trained to overrule with cultural rules make themselves felt again, and somebody starts demanding that the more successful farmers' harvests be seized and handed over to the less successful farmers. Thus are born the left and the right.

It goes beyond economics. Back when most of the food was shared, it didn't much matter which woman a baby came out of; but when each family kept its own food stash, unwed mothers became a recipe either for starving babies or else for responsible people being made to work to support the babies of irresponsible people. A few generations of that and the farmers started piling rules regulating sex on top of all their rules for regulating eating and work; but the instinct to have sex when and with whom you feel like it remained, and that tension led to yet more within-group political conflict.
Click to expand...

Interesting! So many factors to consider.

Thanks for all of this. It helps, and I will keep it in mind.
 
Democrats: Tax & spend on the people.

Republicans: Borrow & spend on the military/law enforcement on the people (not on companies.)
 
As a left leaning person, I like this sound bite used to describe the leftist philosophy:

"When we all do better, we all do better"

As overly simplified as that sounds, there is depth to the statement IMO.
 
4) Are democrats typical more interested in economic equality? 5) If yes, is this a necessary intrinsic "left" element to keep there from being a present day French-type revolution?

I bring up the French Revolution because the king's councel to his left seemed to be in a little more support for equality after the revolution. 6) Was this left counsel installed mostly due to a lesson learnt from the revolution?
Click to expand...

The French revolution was practically a copy of the American experiment, and was a total fiasco when it ended with an emperor: Napoleon.

About the question itself, yes, Democrats seem to work for "economic equality".

But, no country has been created because reasons as "economic equality".

It is not under any principle of any Constitution the goal of making everybody economically equal.

What the US Constitution provides is the goal of opportunities for everybody reach prosperity.

The problem with Democrats is that behind the outside cover of their package, they always include programs which are against nature, like abortion, homosexuality, the novelty called "transgender", etc.

And they do it in that way because in reality they don't care about economic equality for everybody but just the gain of better political positions. Note that most of Democrat leaders are wealthy people, and seeing wealthy people fighting for the poor is not real. The best evidence for my statement is the great support received by the actual president Trump from poor people. This is telling that there is a huge difference between a better economy under an administration and an administration promising you to be wealthy rich. Republicans only promise a better economy. No opium dreams included in their promises.

The worst is that the programs idealized by Democrats rather than make people more wealthy make the people more dependent of the same social programs. In other words, people become slaves of the social programs.

On the other hand, Republicans conserve the original idealism found since the creation of the Roman Republic.
 
ryan said:
To make this less confusing for me, let's just stick with U.S. republicanism (R) vs democratic principles (D) (although, if you want to expand on your country's politics you are more than welcome)

I am a little unsure about what primal elements of fiscal policies of R vs D that manifest to what the GOP wants vs DP (Democratic Party) such as business vs civilian taxes.

6 Questions: (Answer any or all)

1) Am I correct by saying that republicans generally want less taxes on business and more taxes on workers?
Click to expand...

If you go to the roots when this country was founded, there was no Republican party Democrat party.

However, the new nation was already in debt because borrowed money to buy arms and win wars.

About a decade ago, I visited the Mather Luther King Library in Washington DC where it was an exposition of the letters sent by different revolutionary groups and business people which were characters in the independence of several Latino countries in South America.

The letters mostly enforced the obvious: business people incited the masses for causing revolutions so they could sell arms to the kingdom of Spain and the same time of selling arms to revolutionaries. The whole thing was enforced by business people.

Don't think that the US revolution didn't have business people behind the whole process of independence.

Taking away the fact that at the end of the day the revolution reached goals with extraordinary principles in favor of men as individuals and as a society, the other fact is that the business people wanted "their money back". This is to say, the new nations were born with an already national debt.

Got it?

Good.

With this reality in your hand, governments have been passed one to another the duty of paying back "the favor".

Look, when the US was created, there wasn't "equality", because a poor man, lets say a janitor, or a slave or women can't vote to elect the new president or congressmen. This "equality" appeared decades later by pressure of the affected men and women. There were marchers, protesters, etc.

The rich found the way to concede with the petitions but always receiving "the payments of the debt".

So, even when you assume that Democrats fight for equality, you can't be blind when president Obama increased the debt in trillions of dollars without wars as the cause, but surely as a "black president" wishing to stay as the president, he sacrificed a lot from the nation in order to save his butt.

Of course, you have learned history using books gave by the ones who control even the education system.

You must stand in a third point of view, watching the scenario from a different angle, and you will realize that yes, rich people is not working to destroy the poor, but solely to increase their proffit.

If you don't like the things the way they are, they find the way to manage for you getting filthy rich, and be part of the ones who enjoy faster prosperity than you as a poor person.

If you are unable to be rich one day, then just wake up in the morning and enjoy your coffee. Don't become a social resent, being a liberal is not the right answer.
 
The republicans sell policy to corporations and rich people, the democrats don't do that.

Good news, you're the leader of the free world.

- - - Updated - - -

fromderinside said:
The main differences are definition of personal responsibility and degree to which history determines current public policy.
Click to expand...

Also this.

R's: I'm going to take as much as I can for me and my family

D's: I'm going to attempt to not be an asshole to people outside of my family
 
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