I identify as slightly liberal but I do appear half-way to libertarian on many of these simplified-to-stupidity lean tests. I need an issue-by-issue thing. But some general ones:
Health care: Universal health care. Do it. Not full single payer.
Drugs: Decriminalize/legalize all personal use. Commercial? Definitely legalize with regulation marijuana. In fact, anything with lower per-user harm than alcohol. Worse things? I definitely don't want heroin in CVS but....well, that's another discussion.
Social: get government out of marriage, basically. No gain, no loss. Allow any to marry, and tie that to visitation rights and the like. But don't try to influence marriage or not via tax policy or anything else. As in, as long as no laws are broken, I don't care if ten people want to marry each other just so long as that policy goes along with the point about getting rid of tax effects of marriage.
Da Gubbament: I need policy by policy. Government is not inherently anything. Ardent tiny-government right wingers are fools, little better than communists. You're always going to have a government - a local warlord in 1991 Somolia was government for the people in range. The question isn't "is government big or small?" It's "what needs to be done and is what is allocated to the doing of that thing more or less than what is required according to blah blah blah".
when was the last time you saw someone argue in detail like that here? Meaning, naming a specific policy, saying it changed X to Y (numbers), and this is why the new balance of cost/benefit was wrong? That sort of thing.
Taxes: I'd want to hear from economists, but I'd love it if there was a fair way to do a bracketed flat tax. That is, to strip out all of the social initiatives - child tax credit, mortgage interest deduction, etc - but to do it fairly so that it's not regressive. In addition to the billions of headache-hours averted, this would lop off all the tax law/etc industry that has been built up around this. And maybe it would finally make sense to actually underfund the IRS.
I mainly want government not to use tax policy to push initiatives "like that." I put that in quotes because as I type it I realize I've been vague. What about anti-cigarette policies? Am I advocating getting rid of anti-tobacco sin taxes? No. Sales/consumption taxes are different in some ways, comparable in others.
(ie, you could say "but you choose to smoke cigarettes so it's voluntary" but one could reply "yes, but you choose to take a job, so you consent to the income tax).
I could ramble on....but that's a wall of text already
Edit: strong safety net, though. Police it to the extent necessary, but strong safety net.