austerity program

this austerity thing is interesting. so no doubt in some respects cutting government spending exacerbates an economic slowdown. that seems obvious: cut the post office budget, they lay off workers who collect unemployment, stop consuming much of anything, etc. then cut their benefits and they really don't consume and require a variety of other services, and so forth., krugman makes this argument every week. now on the other hand you have to ask yourself, what levels of debt are actually unsustainable or themselves have disastrous effects (like, now 50% of your budget is interest payments, which you can't spend on stimulus or programs to help the newly-huge needy). or, people just will not lend you money anymore and then your forced into truly draconian austerity mode. you could reach the point at which it is simply impossible to continue almost anything the government does. i have to say, any given person's position on this depends on whether they're right or left. left=government can solve all our problems, and i don't think krugman would ever acknowledge a level of debt in a recession to be unsustainable; he might wave in that direction, but when push comes to shove, he thought greece was doing just fine until germany started demanding budget cuts, and that the whole thing would have worked out. if you're a right-winger (unlike me, i declare) or an anti-statist (like me), then you think it will turn out differently, because you want it to turn out differently: you'll take any lever to reduce state power, and believe more or less anything that would support you in that project. i can't unveil the objective facts. all i can do is note that people's empirical claims are predictable from the political philosophy which they held long before the current problems, which is plenty to provisionally discredit both sides. that a given level of debt at this time and place is unsustainable is a question to which all the machinery of right-wing or left-wing thinking developed previously is irrelevant. it's an empirical question.