If you want to see examples of the policies that politicians campaign on but then drop once they’re in power, just take a look at what legislation ends up getting put on the table when there’s absolutely no chance of it passing.

The Democrats had control of both houses of Congress in the us, but it wasn’t until the Republicans ended up with Congress that they decided to put Federal wealth taxes on the table. Now I’m not saying that I agree with Federal wealth taxes, but that’s obviously a thing that they are holding over people’s heads to get them to vote for them.

The Republicans on the other hand talk a really good game on fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets when the Democrats are in power, but when they controlled the executive the Congress and the Senate they ended up passing budgets with some of the largest deficits in history. If you go back in history, for the past 40 years that’s been the case with conservatives. They’ll magically put things on the table to balance the budget when the other party has control of the government and they know there’s no chance of it passing.

In the past 20 years, the Democrats had achieved a supermajority in Congress and the senate, they could have passed any piece of legislation they wanted. They could have passed Federal legislation forcing the states to keep gay marriage and abortion legal. They didn’t do that. So when the flimsy court case gets overturned, there’s much caterwalling over activist judges.

Of course everyone knows about obama, who rose to power in large part because of the anti-war faction of the left and center, but it was actually his Republican successor that finally started the ball rolling on getting America out of Afghanistan. He also talk about shutting down Guantanamo bay, and never did. The Obama administration in general was a perfect example of an administration that campaigns one way and rules other.

Up in canada, prime minister today Justin Trudeau ran on a number of different promises including Senate reform, and proportional representation. Both of those promises were dropped immediately once he got into power. Another quite famous promise was that he was going to bring clean water to all the native reserves that had been underwater advisories in some cases for decades. Despite spending more debt than every single prime minister before him combined, there are still lots of native reserves without clean water.

The previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, was a member of the Conservative party of Canada and obviously ran on fiscal responsibility. It was only in his very last year in charge of the country that he finally balanced the budget. He had been handed a balanced budget by the previous administration, the Federal liberals.

So in general, you can’t actually trust politicians to rule the way that they say they’re going to. You have to wait until a little while after they get into power to see how they’re actually going to rule. You can say that it’s just cuz they’re liars, but in reality a lot of the times answers seem a lot easier when you’re not actually having to make the decisions. I know myself, I’ve been put into positions of power and the people below me thought that I had a lot more latitude than I actually did. They’d say things like “you can’t let them do that!” Not realizing that having a little bit of power did not mean that I could boss everyone around.

Now I’ve talked about a bunch of things that people kind of wanted that went differently, but sometimes while running someone promises to do something really stupid and then they don’t do it, and that’s something else too. Donald Trump repeatedly promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail, and as far as we can tell he didn’t even try. Thank goodness.