What if someone is actually fiscally conservative? Like I have seen the studies where it's cheaper to house the homeless than leave them on the streets. We need to cut wasteful spending on corporate welfare and spreading out the costs of things like AI datacenters to the local community. We need to balance the budget by taxing spending instead of income tax, taxing the absolute dogshit out of billionaires, and adding exceptions for necessities (food, hygiene products, someone can come up with a better list than me). While we're at it, bake the tax into things into the cost. So if my subtotal is $100 I'm paying $100 instead of $108.25 or whatever.

None of that requires the least bit of empathy or caring. It requires only looking coldly at the numbers and seeing that the country was in a much better spot financially when we had a strong middle class and taxed the dog shit out of the rich.

There's more than this by a lot. Empathy demands even more than that. But anyone claiming to be fiscally conservative while not discussing forcing companies and the rich to pay their sharing is lying or duped. Anyone wanting our tax dollars paying for folks who live in the street rather than in houses is cruel or duped, not conservative, because it significantly reduces healthcare costs, justice system costs, and emergency services costs. It's prudent to house folks because it will cost the country less overall. Progressive taxes instead of income taxes makes far more sense, reduces manpower, and reduces government spending.

The people calling themselves fiscally conservative are not. They're shitbags or they've been tricked.

You won't because they dropped that term during Bush second term.