They're pushing good old-fashioned wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Austerity typically includes both spending cuts and tax hikes.

Republicans want the former but not the latter.

Sequester.

Tax hikes.

We's done had austerity in the US, and look where it's gotten us to. Skyrocketing employing, a dramatic reduction in governmental borrowing ...

We have managed to avoid having a balanced budget, however. It's one of Obama's unfulfilled campaign promises, back when we considered budget deficits to be unsustainable.

austerity did not produce the economic growth I would argue, it is the stimulus and spending Obama implemented and has fought to protect.

Certainly is important to avoid being like Greece, but when interest rates are very low, that is the good time to borrow to pay for assets that will produce greater national economic output, like infrastructure, improved communications systems, education, etc.

Balanced budget is something in the US people like to talk about when they pretend to be serious.

Much of government debt is held by the government itself. Is an accounting gimmick

Austerity is not good for any country!

or any other method, is like bleeding a patient with anemia. The cure is effected when the patient is completely drained of blood, a state also known as "dead." The real cure is to remove the parasites by whatever means necessary.

Austerity always shrinks an economy, perpetuating the downward spiral of destruction. Amerikan-style wealth transfers to the richest immiserate the masses because that is what they are designed to do. Two slightly different routes to the same end - reducing the populace to virtual slavery, the total destruction of the commons, and the sale of everything and everybody to the one percenters.

It is bullshit on stilts and steroids, utterly inhuman, and as monstrous as any ideology that has ever existed on earth.

When and if the story of this era is written a hundred years from now, assuming that someone is around to write an objective history, the biggest question will be whether Milton Friedman will beat out Hitler as the Worst and Most Destructive Human Being that has Ever Lived.

Wealth transfer by taxation IS a part of austerity. Because that wealth transfer by taxation are taxes levied on the working class and away from the owners.

full of pot holes, our schools falling apart. But it can also be seen in the food stamp cuts and refusal to expand Medicaid. There are so many ways that it has been used in the USA since raygun was elected that we do not think about them as austerity.