Since most of us were given little-to-no civics education in grade school and have been left to major media’s devices in order to differentiate between supposedly opposing political ideologies in current American terms, I thought I’d take a stab at condensing this overly-complicated and widely-misinformed subject into a more digestible foundation of definitions. The way I see it, all federal policy can be reasonably fit into one of three categories: economic, foreign, and domestic (civil/social). Within each of these categories exists an ideological spectrum with antithetical endpoints. For economic ideology, it’s the market forces of supply versus demand that define the ends of the spectrum; one either believes demand drives supply or vice versa, and approaches each economic policy decision from that perspective. I’ve written in detail about this subject here . Foreign policy exists on an interventionism/isolationism spectrum wherein nearly none of it rests entirely on eithe...
Macroeconomic theory and economic policy are two wildly complicated fields of study, the latter even more compounded by its nasty habit of being written in confounding legalese. Most people hardly look into economics any further than how it most directly affects their personal finances, although everyone has an opinion on how taxes are collected and subsequently spent. But a basic understanding of how macroeconomic policy works is of the utmost importance when it comes to electing representatives who shape our socio-economic environment; the job of a governing body is to help guide how a market's causes, effects, and fluctuations affect its participants and the citizenry as a whole. While nuance may increase when going from fundamental theory to specific legislation, the approach to economic policy stems from really only two philosophies. The first believes that corporations and the wealthy are responsible for spurring economic growth through job creation and capital investmen...