Making sure that the budget is balanced. you can do this in two ways, by CUTTING programs until you are not spending more than you are taking in. Or by raising enough revenues to pay for programs that by political policy you beleive are necesary, but also humane in a just and compassionate society.Progressive income taxation is the HEART of the democratic partoes platform for fiscal responsibility:
Where We Stand
In keeping with our party's grand tradition, we reaffirm Jefferson's belief in individual liberty and capacity for self-government. We endorse Jackson's credo of equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. We embrace Roosevelt's thirst for innovation and Kennedy's summons to civic duty. And we intend to carry on Clinton's insistence upon new means to achieve progressive ideals...
We believe that government's proper role in the New Economy is to equip working Americans with new tools for economic success and security.
We believe in expanding trade and investment because we must be a party of economic progress, not economic reaction.
We believe that global markets demand global rules and institutions to ensure fair competition and to provide checks and balances on private power.
We believe that fiscal discipline is fundamental to sustained economic growth as well as responsible government.
We believe that a progressive tax system is the only fair way to pay for government.
We believe the Democratic Party's mission is to expand opportunity, not government.
http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=1926Most notably, Dean has opposed and threatend to veto the attempt to institute a progressive income tax at the state level. HE actually reversed the progressive tax that Snelling inpemented to balance the budget before he died once the budget was balanced.
Conservatives beleive that it you CUT taxes and give more money to the people at the top, they will create the means, such as jobs, for people to move up out of poverty. This also means that they will also provide as a part of those jobs, health care benefits, pensions to reward those who have worked loyally and so on.
An elected official who is a fiscal conservative holds to the laissez faire capitalistic model and does not approve of unions and does what they can to oppose unions. As Bush is trying to do with overtime pay.Fiscal conservatives hold to a "RIGHT TO WORK" policy and this is why it is impossible to get them to raise minimum wage to a living wage.
Which is why workers must form unions in order as a group to do what businesses do with products. A union is simply a cartel in which workers treat their product (labor) as a commodity and try to set uniform pricing among all of the laborers and NOT sell their commodity for less.
On any issue, whetther it was between the environment, universities, roadbuilding, infreastructure, OR Big Business and job creation which may seem like a noble task, but if all you are doing is providing Wal-Mart, minimum wage jobs, is not a good trade off.
You cannot separate one aspect of fiscal conservatism from its other aspects, They are whole and of piece.
That is the problem with Deans fiscal conservatism, There are great flaws in his record. He wanted to increase health care in Vermont, to the degree ofuniversal coverage. But his economic model in this was flawed.
WHen He first came to office, ACT 160, of 1992, was sewt up to reorganize Vermonts Health Departments into the Vermont Health Care Authority, which had a number of tasks set for it, like setting up a computereized data base of health care services and of a databas of people who had health coverage and how they got it (through work on medicaid, on medicare, under the early version of Dr Dynasaur, that was started in 1989) It also moved Dr. Dynasaur from being a state run and financed program to being fininced under medicaid.
One other task set for VHCA was to come up with recommendations for TWO universal health care systems. One to be a multi-payer system, in which all employers who did not provide health care for their employees would be required to under law. The other was for a single payer plan. Dean preferred the first multi-payer plan but the proble with his idea was that it forced all small businesses to provide health insurance for their employees, even small mom and pop type businesses who were not even making enough money to provide it for themselves and perhaps hired on assistant. He did not provide any state funding to assist such small businesses to do this. Of course, the bill was strangled at birth by republicans. THe second bill single payer, never even made it to a vote, becasue Dean, as a fiscal conservative, balked at the slighest suggestion of a payroll tax or progressive heal tax to pay for it. So Deans first and most important piece of legislation he suggested in all his years as governor, was killed by the person who suggested it to begin with.
Dean then tried wrtangle with federal money to provide health care through medicaid, by using new laws passed by Clintons attempt to provide universal health care. This expanded the level above poverty that the states could allow people to be eligible for medicaid. There was acomplex formula, but essentially if the states paid more money to give insurance to those above the federal poverty level, the feds would pick up a larger portion of the payments for those below the federal poverty level.
Dean had Vermont apply for a subsection 1115 exemption to pay for medicaid. This exemption allow a state to use money that the federal government gave to them for other purposes, like state universities and prison and whatever, to use money that was not pent on those programs or left over from those programs and move them into medicaid.
The flaw in fiscal conservatism is that the law of gravity does NOT apply to economics. The free market tends to keep as much money at the top of the economic ladder, and those at the top tend to pay as little as possible, give as little in benefits as possible, and consider labor as an expendable.
Problem was, that Dean started really underfunding things like the state univeristies (they only got seven percent increases while he was governor) and applying them to trying to provide more medicaid coverage. This resulted in roads being left unrepaired or new raods that were needed being unbuilt and so on. Prisons were allwed to become very overcrowded. Lots of other things. Deans attempts to expand medical coverage resulted in a state that by 2001, the shifting of funds to try to provide health insurance reached the point at which the medicaid program expense was threatenening to virtually destroy government:
A. On January 24, 2001, Governor Howard Dean issued an executive order establishing a Special Governor's Bipartisan Commission on Health Care Availability and Affordability.
. Based on what we have learned, we do agree on this: Health care in Vermont is near a state of crisis -- some of us would say it is already in crisis -- and all health care sectors are on edge. We also note that many of these problems are national or even global in scope and that our abilities to solve them at the state level are limited.
C. Health care costs in Vermont, now exceeding $2 billion a year, are of a sufficient magnitude, however, and are increasing at a sufficient rate to place state government itself in jeopardy, including every program for which it appropriates money. By comparison, Vermonters budgeted $1.8 billion for all state government services in FY 2001 (not including federal funds).3
We are rapidly approaching the point at which these costs will directly conflict with our ability to do such things as to maintain roads and bridges, for example, or to provide cost-effective services to our infants and children, to promote agriculture and tourism, or to provide any other services our citizens have come to expect.
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:aC9QzqwOEmkJ:www.state.vt.us/health/commission/docs/report/mainreport.doc+%22Howard+Dean%22+%22Incentive+Plan+for+Medicaid%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8You can read the entire report for yourself, but it's findings are pretty grim.
Problem is Dean had two manias. One for balancing the budget, and the other for a health care program that he did not want to raise taxes to finance.
So when people from Vermont see the Howard Dean who is running for president, they are either quite bemused, amused, or pissed that the guy running for president does not resemble the guy who ran the state while they were busy fighting with him to not cut funding to universities, drug treatment, and a number of traditionally democratic programs.
So it is very difficult for somone who actually looks back at his career as governor, in which he was most often found siding with Republicans and their plans to cut income taxes in such a way that the welathy benefited most and then would do their fiscally conservative trickle down thing, rather than support Democratic compassionate social programs by creating a progressive income tax. Vermont has an income tax, but the bulk of its revenues come from property taxes, again, those who can least affor to pay them, are hit in the pocket harder than the rich.
Dena started his personal political life as a Republican, and for th most part is better described as a Rockerfeller Republican, than a Conservative Democrat.
Indeed, as Norman Solomon observes, there's a real disconnect between Dean's media image and his record.
"But the Democratic Leadership Council need not despair. Most of the nation's political journalists, including pro-Democrat pundits, insist that the party should not nominate someone too far 'left' -- which usually means anybody who's appreciably more progressive than the DLC. That bias helps to account for the frequent mislabeling of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who has risen to the top tier of contenders for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
After Dean officially announced his campaign on June 23, some news stories identified him with the left. It's a case of mistaken identity. 'He's really a classic Rockefeller Republican -- a fiscal conservative and social liberal,' according to University of Vermont political scientist Garrison Nelson."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/27/we_473_02.htmlAS a matter of fact, the balancing of the 60 million dollar deficit that he inherited when Snelling died was largely balanced by a decision his predecessor, Richard Snelling already set up, conceding reluctantly that the only way to balance the budget, was to Pass a temporary three tiered, progressive cnome tax that was to be rolled back once the budget was balanced.
Against the protests of his own party, Dean rolled back thee taxes, but immediately deficits began rearing their ugly heads and rather than admint that the Democrats and Progressives were correct. Dena began trying to cut programs. Fighting with his own party every step of the way:
The state was in a fiscal crisis at the time, working its way out of the biggest budget deficit in its history. Then-Gov. Richard Snelling had pushed a series of temporary tax increases and budget cuts through the Legislature and Dean took up that austerity plan as his own.
To the anger of more liberal members of his own party, he insisted that the tax increases be rolled back on schedule and then went on to work for additional tax cuts later in his tenure.
By the same token, though, he also supported raising taxes — as long as it wasn’t the income tax — when school funding crises and other issues arose that required it.
Throughout, he held a tight rein on state spending, repeatedly clashing with the Democrats who controlled the Legislature for most of his years as governor.
Dean trimmed spending or held down increases in areas held dear by the liberals. More than once, Dean went to battle over whether individual welfare benefits should rise under automatic cost of living adjustments. Liberals were particularly incensed when he tried that tactic on a program serving the blind, disabled and elderly, which he did several times.
http://www4.fosters.com/News2003/May2003/May_19/News/reg_vt0519a.aspWhich is why, manty people in Vermont do not even recognize the Howard Dean who is running for president:
SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. - As Vermont governor, Howard Dean was known as a buttoned-down and bottom-line chief executive. He fought higher taxes, cut programs over the cries of fellow Democrats and often sided with business when the choice was jobs versus the environment.
Which explains why many people back home scarcely recognize Howard Dean the presidential candidate, who has stirred liberals across the country with his blunt talk and passionate antiwar speeches.
"A lot of us laugh and say, 'Howard, we hardly knew you,' " said Elizabeth Ready, the state auditor and a liberal Democrat. Added Bob Sherman, a Democratic lobbyist, "The Howard Dean I see running for president is a lot different than the Howard Dean who . . . governed Vermont. He was a moderate."
http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/recent2003/0713%5Fdeanvermont%5F2003.shtmlA number of people in the democratic party went a bit furtther than describing Dean as a moderate. A large number actully simply referred tohim as a "Republican in drag"
Aside from Deans somewhat reluctant passing of the Civil Union Act ( no matter what Deans supporters say about it, Civli Unions and Gay Rights just were not on his radar screen. It was never a passionate issue with him and he was worried greatly about the effect that supporting it would have on his chances at re-election).
In many other areas that are traditinally socially liberal, such as passing medical marijuana, and the use of methadone maintenance for herion addict, Dean was just as conservative in his stance as any Republican or consevative. There is not a great deal of evidence in his record for even considering him to be a social liberal.
Thats the problem. There is not much in Deans record that indicates that he will hold to the platform he is campaigning on.
No one know if once in office, Dean the candidate will revert to Dean the governor, in the Oval Office. Which means that, like in Vermont,the universal health care he is promising, might just disappear as a being fiscally irresponsible. That Dena will not be as fiscally conservative as George Bush.
This is very likely, because the budget deficit that exists now as a result of three years of fiscally conservative tax cuts will not be fixed by repealing the Bush tax cuts. Especially while attempting to mandate a massive entitlement program.
WE know what the other candidates have done while in Washington. FOr the most part, like Clinton, they have excercised fiscal ressponsibility, but by rasing the top rate for income tax on the rich, and opposed cuts to the budget in area that effected the social safety net wherever they could get away with getting it past republicans.
But we have no way of knowing what Dean WILL do. We know what he has done.
Fiscal Conservatism is his passion. He has sacrificed EVERYTHING and EVERYONE else to be true to that one ideal. Balancing the Budget, not raising taxes, cutting programs.
So has the president we have in office.
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