I am going to try to ask this in the least inflammatory way--<p>Why are you with the Republicans on financial matters?<p>I <i>am</i> a partisan Democrats and enjoy scoring points on the internet as much as the next fellow, but I&#x27;m also genuinely curious.  From my perspective, the Republicans are extraordinarily financially irresponsible, all reputation and no substance.  (It&#x27;s like the old saying -- you get a reputation as an early riser and you can sleep in til noon.)  They want to cut taxes, yes, but their proposals to do so all involve drastically unbalancing the Federal budget to do so.  At their most serious, they include unspecified $XYZ billion spending cuts and then never specify what they would actually cut to close the gap.<p>Obama&#x27;s deficit, meanwhile, has largely been the result of automatic spending increases from pre-existing legislation in response to the Great Recession; his stimulus bill from the first year of his Presidency was a small fraction of the increased spending on Medicaid and Welfare and SNAP as millions of people lost their jobs, on Social Security as people retired early, and Medicare as people deferred medical treatment until they qualified.<p>The ACA was funded, is costing less than projected, and is in fact controlling medical costs, which makes long term financial projections much rosier than they were ten years ago.  There is no plan to replace it, and repealing it, as Republicans keep trying to do, would be bad for our short term and long term financial health.<p>Obama has significantly reduced the size of the Federal workforce (I am actually unhappy about that, since it probably slowed down the recovery).<p>So why do you consider the Republicans fiscally conservative?