Libertarian Tyler Cowen notes that "It is also well understood in German political discourse that tax cuts need to be paid for" in an article about the German economy. This makes a nice contrast with American conservatives. However, Cowen demonstrates he is a member of the "Pain Caucus" by arguing that Germany's competitiveness is a result of labor policies he likes:

Policy makers have returned to long-run planning, and during the last decade have liberalized their labor markets, introduced greater wage flexibility and recently passed a constitutional amendment for a nearly balanced budget by 2016, meaning that the structural deficit should not exceed 0.35 percent of gross domestic product.

And by attempting to argue against the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. As I understand it, Germany's labor policies are still much better than America's, even if they have been "liberalizing" them. They have more cause to worry about inflation - but not much more - with their "automatic stabilizers" being much more robust (not to mention fair and just). This keeps up demand in Germany proper with an automatic stimulus even as demand plummets in the periphery as austerity measures are enacted.

Regarding Cowen's argument against fiscal stimulus, Paul Krugman notes the many ways Cowen's example of German reunification is a poor one to use.

1. This was not an effort at fiscal stimulus; it was a supply policy, not a demand policy. The German government wasn’t trying to pump up demand -- it was trying to rebuild East German infrastructure to raise the region’s productivity.

2. The West German economy was not suffering from high unemployment -- on the contrary, it was running hot, and the Bundesbank feared inflation.

3. The zero lower bound was not a concern. In fact, the Bundesbank was in the process of raising rates to head off inflation risks -- the discount rate went from 4 percent in early 1989 to 8.75 percent in the summer of 1992. In part, this rate rise was a deliberate effort to choke off the additional demand created by spending on East Germany, to such an extent that the German mix of deficit spending and tight money is widely blamed for the European exchange rate crises of 1992-1993.

In short, it’s hard to think of a case less suited to tell us anything at all about fiscal stimulus under the conditions we now face.

To reiterate, America's fiscal stimulus was demand side; we are in a liquidity trap/up against the zero bound; and finally we are suffering from high unemployment and possible deflation. The German reunification scenario contains none of these three elements.

Krugman writes that Cowen's commentary is despair inducing, but is it really that surprising? I was skimming Isaac Asimov's memoir and he gives a concise account of why he considered himself a liberal:

That is, conservatives tend to like people who resemble themselves and distrust others. In my youth, in the United States the backbone of social, economic, and political power rested with an establishment consisting almost entirely of people of Northwestern European extraction, and the conservatives making up that establishment were contemptuous of others. Among others, they were contemptuous of Jews and in the Hitler years they were not very troubled by the Nazis, whom they considered a bulwark against Communism.

...

I wanted to see the United States changed and made more civilized, more humane, truer to its own proclaimed traditions. I wanted to see all Americans judged as individuals and not as stereotypes. I wanted society to feel a reasonable concern for the welfare of the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the aged, the hopeless.

Having elected a black President, America has improved. But there has been some backsliding in other ways.

Robert Heinlein, however, who was a burning liberal during the war, became a burning conservative afterward, the change coming at about the time he swapped wives from the liberal Leslyn to the conservative Virginia. I doubt that Heinlein would call himself a conservative, of course. He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means: "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve." It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

When thinking about the Reagan era, Asimov - who died in 1992 - quotes these lines from Oliver Goldsmith:

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,