The 1990s saw 'liberal' governments in both the US and Canada that had totally bought the conservative agenda of the 80s. But the picture for these governments isn't quite as bad as it looks. The 90s, after the first couple of years, was a period of quite strong growth, so public spending could potentially go up but fall as a share of GDP. Then as unemployment was falling, the amount being paid out in unemployment benefit and some other poverty-related benefits would have been falling too. Finally, you can put 0.8 percentage points of the fall in Canada and 1.8 percentage points in the US down to the fall in military spending as a share of GDP. That's actually at least half the fall under Clinton. But the ideological Neo-liberalism is still a major factor of course. Then with the Bush government, the increase in the share up to 2008 is entirely accounted for by military spending, and the huge increase afterwards is, first, the fall in GDP (which increases the share), and then the Obama stimulus (they've somehow put 2009 under Bush).
None of this detracts from the main point which is that fiscal conservatism sucks, and it is unbelievably stupid how many people have bought into it. Problem is, Keynesianism is counter-intuitive, so when you've got so much propaganda behind the austerity argument, it's very hard to get its fallacies through to people.
I think the point you make, about how Tories still want to spend your money, just on their cronies and pet interests, is one of the ways to go. Like wars and tax cuts for the rich (which is not spending as such, but still is a revenue losing move), and so on.
Then again, the austerity vs Keynesianism argument and the size of government argument are actually in theory two separate ones; you could have austerity purely by raising taxes, or Keynesian stimulus (though a less effective one) through cutting them. But in practice of course, when they talk about austerity it's almost always about cutting spending. And raising taxes in general has become almost a total taboo. (Though mild increases on the rich does seem to have come back into the debate a bit at least in some parts, including the UK).
no subject
None of this detracts from the main point which is that fiscal conservatism sucks, and it is unbelievably stupid how many people have bought into it. Problem is, Keynesianism is counter-intuitive, so when you've got so much propaganda behind the austerity argument, it's very hard to get its fallacies through to people.
I think the point you make, about how Tories still want to spend your money, just on their cronies and pet interests, is one of the ways to go. Like wars and tax cuts for the rich (which is not spending as such, but still is a revenue losing move), and so on.
Then again, the austerity vs Keynesianism argument and the size of government argument are actually in theory two separate ones; you could have austerity purely by raising taxes, or Keynesian stimulus (though a less effective one) through cutting them. But in practice of course, when they talk about austerity it's almost always about cutting spending. And raising taxes in general has become almost a total taboo. (Though mild increases on the rich does seem to have come back into the debate a bit at least in some parts, including the UK).