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Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that they (republicans) tend to want to cut taxes but not services, because they can't compromise and cut both the military and medicare/Medicaid/welfare/etc. They just want to cut the latter.

The lack of compromise leads to neither happening so many republicans really don't want smaller govt. Some do, don't get me wrong. But many don't.

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Actually, Republicans can be quite willing to cut the military, remember Dwight "military-industrial complex" Eisenhower, under who it was cut after the Korean War wound down, and you could make a case that the current sequester is cutting the budget. It's very very hard to analyze, because you have to factor in wars, especially ones we did not exactly choose to fight (e.g. Korean), and weapons procurement. E.g. however bogus the F-35 is, or the premature cut of manufacturing the F-22 was, one way or another we'd be spending a lot of money right now replacing the tactical airplanes we started building in the '70s (especially since the F-15A through D models were improperly manufactured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#S...)

And I see no signs the establishment GOP is truly interested in cutting "medicare/Medicaid/welfare", however much they might talk about cutting the latter two. Heck, they can't even bring themselves to terminate with extreme prejudice the National Endowment for the Arts.

I'd argue that this was a very, very different brand of republicans you had then compared to the current breed, which seems to lack any rationality, whatsoever.

Eisenhower was a republican before the conservative military hawks entered the republican demographic (resulting after Nixon's Southern Strategy[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy]) so they were the progressive and liberal republican party. More closely linked to a libertarian ideology of the time and would be likened by most modern liberal democrats.

It's not that simple. E.g. how would you score Teddy Roosevelt, who was both a progressive and a "conservative military hawk". Vs. William Howard Taft, who per Wikipedia had a "domestic agenda [that] emphasized trust-busting, civil service reform, strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission, improving the performance of the postal service, and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment" (income tax) but had a less bellicose foreign policy?

I actually don't know much about that period of US history, but certainly Goldwater counts for both a "conservative" military hawk and a libertarian. And domestically Nixon was quite liberal.

Basically, there's been "liberal" and "conservative" strands in Republican party history for more than a century, continuing to this day. Things don't map out in simple ways, e.g. the first post-Snowden House vote on those issues didn't split along any recognizable patterns I could discern, party, region of the country, etc.

There have been many proposals on the table.

Most republican proposals called for cutting the nominal rate, while getting rid of all the loopholes.

I like it because it introduces transparency. What good is a high nominal rate, if nobody ever pays that rate? The money is usually parked off-shore, etc.

While that's a good approach, it has the problem that it starts another cycle of adding loopholes for the usual considerations.

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