What is the difference between a fiscal conservative and a fiscal conservative?
Some terms outgrow their usefullness. They get associated with good, and then everybody becomes one. "Fiscal conservative" is one of those terms. Anybody in or around the political arena today you ask will claim to be a fiscal conservative, from presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to Steve Forbes. The term is used to often for a couple different ideas, I get confused as to what people mean by it. I think we need to lay down a definition to help me out during this part of the election cycle.
The term used to mean low taxes, low spending levels, and a balanced budget. But now the 'and' has been turned into an 'or'. There seems to have been two man groups emerging: those that look at the deficit before taxes and those that look at taxes before the deficit.
The deficit hawks are those like Howard Dean or Ross Perot. These are the people that seek to bring about a balanced budget, before anything else, and often by raising taxes. The Concord Coalition fits in here although their solution is to gut entitlement spending (so maybe calling them entitlement or budget hawks is a better name) as well as the IMF who routinely councils nations to take loans and then hike taxes to pay for them (diving economies into the ground for 30 years).
Then there is the taxation hawks that put tax cutting ahead of deficit reduction. These are people like President John F. Kennedy and President Ronald Reagan. Both used amazingly similar ideas to defend their tax cutting packages and both sought to outgrow debt. They both proposed spending cuts, but taxes were more important to get though and expend political capital on. Kennedy explicitly said that he was concerned about national debt, but that we were not going to tax our way out of it, instead we needed to grow our way out of it. This also includes groups like the libertarian Cato Institute and conservative Heritage Foundation.
It is this second group that I think are the true fiscal conservatives. When thinking of fiscal conservative, the first group I think of is the Cato Institute. They de facto own the moniker and get to define it.
So, are there any fiscal conservatives running in the 2004 election? Dean places tax raising before tax cutting. Bush doesn't seem to have any secondary thought about controlling the deficit. This just doesn't seem to be an election for fiscal conservatives.