According to Keynes, "the boom, not the slump". Nations may have practiced austerity in boom times, for all I know, but they haven't made much of a fuss about it if they have. I imagine there isn't much popular support for it - if you're doing well, you're more likely to spend extravagantly, so (following the kitchen table economics model) why shouldn't the government? But austerity imposed on a country like Greece during a recession, is just a way to strangle it and insure that it will never pay anything off.Three Valves wrote:Just out of curiosity, when is a good time for "austerity" or when was the last time Greece implemented such a scheme??
Let's say you're way over your head on your credit card, so the bank repo'd your car yesterday - and it's 6AM and you're 20 miles from your place of employment. Good luck with that debt payment schedule, without a job! When we look at this through the kitchen table economics perspective, it may almost seem like the right thing, because justice maybe ought to be a higher priority than the bank getting its money back. But if we're talking about nations? No. Dunking 11 million people into economic recession is never the right thing, for a peaceful nation anyway (and Greece, beyond just a peaceful nation, has been there on the front lines for the West since they invented the West.)