If it relates to the governments expenditures then it is a fiscal argument. If the policy is based on such a fiscal argument then it is a fiscal policy.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “n!gger, n!gger, n!gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n!gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n!gger, n!gger.”
This is "states rights" levels of pedantic, incorrect stubbornness.
What they wrote down into law was fiscal, but just saying "fiscal policy" completely ignores the whole context to an absurd abstract degree, and this is intentional.
If there's one thing the right are good at it's indoctrination. They co-opt spaces and then use them to infect people with their mindset.
And damn is it ever effective. Someone close to me is normally a leftist – she proudly supports her union (and unions in general), is strongly in favor of LGBT+ rights and environmental protection, mistrusts most political parties as they're too much in bed with big business etc.
However, she also hangs out on 9GAG, which apparently has been pretty much taken over by the right. This has greatly affected her views on immigrants since she's exposed to unchallenged right-wing drivel every day. It was "fun" when she told me how refugee facilities are hotbeds of violent crime and then it turned out that the unspecified statistics she was basing this on were mostly about violence against refugees.
(Not that those camps perfectly safe by themselves but not in the way right wingers make it sound like refugees and immigrants (who are conflated) are all violent anarchists who are above the law.)
Recently she just had to share this "joke" with me. The whole thing consisted of two police officers with Turkish names finding a generic German name exotic. That was it; I couldn't find any punchline in there, just a "the immigrants are replacing us" message. I'm just writing for the day when I hear the word "Ăśberfremdung" ("overforeigning", a standard term of the far right) out of her mouth.
It goes on like that. Politically she's convinced that the Greens are completely unviable as a party and the worst part of the current government – the FDP (our liberal party for rich people) gets no mention despite being diametrically opposed to most of her core views. Ricarda Lang (a Green politician) being fat is much more important and will never get old.
I have no idea how to counter this but I'm afraid that she'll drift off into the hard right with time. She seems unwilling to accept that her main source of funnies is also chock full of right wing propaganda.
That is part if the problem. The other part, at least is my country, is that the left is failing to present a believable alternative. Idealistic rhetoric from an ivory tower doesn't convince people their practical problems will be solved.
My old working class neighbourhood used to be relatively safe, now it isn't. A major demographic change occurred. It's not hard to see what happened.
This chronic inability by some on the left to acknowledge that mass immigration does at least some damage to the social fabric, is part of why the rightoids are winning. People on the ground can see it, and shouting to the contrary from ivory tower PMC liberals who consider themselves lefties is not going to change that.
In Canada we are undergoing a collapse of the healthcare system and a shortage of housing.
But if you say "maybe bringing more people into the country when we can't house or care for the people who are already here is a bad idea," suddenly you're a racist.
Immigration policy has real effects on the lives of current citizens, and it is not racist to acknowledge those effects.
No country in Northern Europe has Socialism. They have a strong social welfare system on top of a capitalist economy. Aka Social Democracy. Not even close to socialism.
Socdem countries are great for the people living in them but they rely heavily on the exploitation of the global south. The devastation of capitalism was simply exported to people who had no other choice but to accept it
This is the talking point anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily true however. The underlying assumption is that you can't have Nordic-style socdem countries without the exploitation of other poorer countries, but I don't think this has been shown at all.
It has definitely been shown. Have you ever seen a capitalist country (which socdem countries are ultimately) that relies entirely on its own local resources. One that does not do business with exploitative global corporations? You can't find one because it doesn't exist and can't exist. Capitalism relies on constant growth and you cannot constantly grow when your resources and labor force are limited so they find more resources and labor forces elsewhere eventually.
Think of it like this, if a business does not grow it stock value stays the same and investors gain nothing. So the business must grow or investors might pull out or invest in the competition that is growing causing the business to fail. So when a business cannot grow because it lacks the local resources and labor force to do so it must find it somewhere else. Usually this happens when a business realizes it can profit more of it finds cheaper (more exploitable) labor from more desperate people in order to outcompete competition. It is inherent to capitalism that it must expand it must grow or it fails.
So from this you can extrapolate that a capitalist country run within its own means will eventually stagnate and either give into the capitalist push to expand beyond its means or economically collapse.
Classic leftist wall of text I know but these things are hard to explain in simple terms without making them inaccurate in some way or making them too unclear.
Related but a bit off topic for those who are interested:
Socdem countries are also doomed eventually stop being socdem at some point. There's this thing big capitalist do where when the government does something they don't like they'll just stop investing in things as a form of protest causing huge economic dips. Eventually as these capitalist under a socdem society realize their profit margins are thinning and they have less to gain from exploiting the global poor they will look for more local ways to increase profit such as repealing workers rights, crushing unions, and involving themselves in government because it's always cheaper to change the law than it is to change the business.
Eventually all socdem countries will reach a point where their capitalist will either leave because they can profit more elsewhere or threaten to leave as leverage for "making business more profitable" by throwing away everything that makes a socdem country a socdem country. The reason this happens is because capitalist will always have a motive to reduce workers rights as well as the privatization of government works such as healthcare in order to profit more. It is inherent to the system
Northern Europe is Capitalist with safety nets, not Socialist. Regardless of how well or poorly they are doing (they seem to be declining in many metrics they lead the rest of the world in), if you want to advocate for adopting some of their successful policy, call it Social Democracy.
Socialism isn't "moderate safety nets," it's an economic system based on Worker Ownership of the Means of Production.