"Party of free speech," my ass.
replies(6):
There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.
The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.
I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
How are you defining "deficit-reducing"?
>Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-biden-add-...
That rate of debt increase is neither responsible or sustainable - though such irresponsible behavior has now been adopted by both parties. Both parties seem to have become radicalized and are catering to their worst instincts.
There are two ways to lower the deficit: increase revenue or lower spending.
As you say, neither party does particularly well at lowering spending.
The moderate Republican approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through regressive taxes. The general theory since Reagan (and before) has been taxing the upper brackets hurts economic growth. The ideal of this is a flat tax or “fair tax.”
The centrist Democrat approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through progressive taxes. The general theory is that wealth inequality is overall bad, and since purchasing power is more or less logarithmic in dollars, the upper brackets suffer relatively less from higher tax rates. The ideal of this is the post-war 90% top bracket.
Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking. Household debt is already frighteningly high and the savings rate very low despite relatively high interest rates. If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
Of course this is all written in very broad strokes and there are a hundred nitpicks one could make on this general point of view, but this is a forum comment and not a dissertation on political economics.
>...Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking.
Many people point to the high government spending in some of the OECD countries, but what they fail to recognize is that the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The difference is that in those other OECD countries, the middle class pays a higher share of the taxes and there is more money available because there are a lot more middle class tax payers than high income payers.
>If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
The tax to GDP ratio has remained fairly stable for decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The effective tax rates paid by the high income earners is fairly close to the highest it has ever been.
Your original point was:
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
Again, I have a hard time considering a party that increases spending so much that debt will be increased by $4.7 trillion to be one that can be called "deficit-reducing". (Nor can the R party be called that either of course.) Just because the D party talks about raising revenue doesn't really mean anything.