<i>The most obvious symptom of the malaise is the huge debts we have managed to accumulate in recent decades, which - unlike in the past - cannot largely be blamed on wars.</i><p>U.S. Defense spending is around $900 B/yr (including veterans health, etc). That is the post-Iraq War cost. Social Security is net $0 (what comes in, goes out, either today or tomorrow, and with relatively minor adjustments and the elimination of gov't "borrowing" from SS funds, it can stay that way forever). Medicare is perhaps 1/4 the cost of defense spending.<p>I fail to see how debt can be attributed to social services simply because you might decide to stop calling things "war".<p>"Young" people might consider austerity if, firstly, defense budgets were cut down by orders of magnitude. Let's see how much debt is accumulated when we're not throwing away (bombing away) nearly 50% of revenue.<p><i>The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.</i><p>No. The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows relatively few to massively and outrageously profit via post-9/11 escalation of defense spending.<p><i>If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.</i><p>Even excluding the complete failure to acknowledge out of control defense spending as the #1 cause of economic issues, there are many, many aspects of the Tea Party that simply have nothing to do with economics, and are in themselves completely out of sync with large swathes of people (perhaps most particularly young people). And now, with consideration that defense spending is the #1 issue, the attraction of youth to Occupy makes a lot of sense.<p>If older American's knew what was good for their children, they'd run as fast as they could from the Tea Party, and perhaps Occupy would be less viewed (inaccurately) as naive.<p>And all that's leaving aside the fact that a significant portion of the economic downturn was due to the machinations of the financial market leaders. Yet these leaders are the least affected by austerity measures. Perhaps some minor tangible steps should be taken to address those leaders before asking the rest of the world to pick up the slack.
An extended counter-argument emerges from these blog posts:<p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/think-of-the-children-2/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/think-of-the-chi...</a><p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/doing-their-best-to-destroy-europe/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/doing-their-best...</a><p><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/insane-in-spain/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/insane-in-spain/</a>
I'd say this is spot on, but the question is that of whether paying off the vast majority of the debt is even possible. In the USA especially, I've long since concluded it simply cannot happen.<p>Look at how much bickering the Republicans and Democrats have over even relatively minor issues. $10^9 is one 15-thousandth of the national debt and there's fights about such amounts.
It's possible both to be against the government debts & deficit spending, and to be against an austerity agenda. For example, one way to reduce the deficit and debt with minimal pain and austerity is to reduce discretionary military spending (which, for the US, is arguably what most of it is, in the form of overseas adventures and bases, and astronomically expensive weapon systems), and to increase taxes and/or otherwise close loopholes & exemptions for the rich and large corporations. Niall has argued for gutting and privatizing social safety net programs, and for abolishing income tax, inheritance taxes and gift taxes, and replacing them with a national sales tax. Any objective economist will tell you that over time that will lead to a society where there is an even larger plutocratic aristocracy -- which, coupled with "one dollar, one vote" mechanisms (like the Citizens United decision) that have been getting stronger in the US recently -- would further distort democracy away from the best interests of the young or poor working class and the 99%, and toward the best interests of the wealthiest 1%.
Is it just me, or does he not actually make a case for austerity here? He makes a case for the government balancing its books, but there are other ways (such as higher taxes and defaults) which are hardly touched on here.<p>I've seen Niall Ferguson's TV series (the ascent of money etc.) which are quite good, but this article seems dangerously ideological to me.
Why should anyone welcome a system - be it austerity or extend and pretend where they or their children pay to line the pockets of the 1%?<p>I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state, but OP, how could you consider anything other than the Iceland solution to be the correct course?
Austerity is a great tool to starve the beast [1].<p>I think the three biggest issues are some spending, taxes and regulation that's spiralling out of control. However, RARELY do authoritative spending is cut, leading to broken fallacy issues [2].<p>Secondly, taxes kept being cut so money has to be found somewhere. What better way to take advantage of those without much of a political voice? Youth, disabled, unemployment, etc. Those services are being cut. While some taxes are randomly raised on others, leading to schizophrenic implementations (A tax on corn because it causes fat, but wait, it has a subsidy? I heard).<p>Thirdly, the parties have socially authoritative and fiscally libertarian attitudes. This means cracking down on general freedom in life (conservative/traditional) while giving more freedom to those with money.<p>It's almost as if the parties in power are forming a feudal-style police state. Literally.<p>What I found that's very sad is that most of the politicians in Western countries benefited from cheap or FREE university education and are now demanding the youth to accept those cuts. Fucking hypocrites.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window</a>
If a company/startup/government could loan money at a very low rate to invest in profitable and/or useful projects for which there is known demand and they refused, what would you say?
Austerity doesn't seem to be solving the problem. Stimulus sort of helped, but was applied at the top. Trickle-down is known to not work very well...<p>Major governments will either find something that works, or we are likely to see repeats of the French Revolution translated to modern times and idioms.
For perspective: the author of this piece is a right-wing ideologue who has called for eliminating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and all income taxes on the rich.<p>Not sure what this piece has to do with Hacker News either.