Sometimes the austerity is ideologically motivated rather than pragmatic. The goal is to reduce public spending, and it's often combined with tax cuts for the w

Sometimes the austerity is ideologically motivated rather than pragmatic. The goal is to reduce public spending, and it's often combined with tax cuts for the well-off. Public finances don't get any better, but the income/wealth distribution will change. And sometimes austerity means stupid spending reductions that would not even qualify as cost savings under any meaningful accounting scheme. You save money on infrastructure maintenance, education, preventative healthcare, mental health services, and youth work, and you don't see any changes in the short term. But in the long term, you get failing infrastructure, a less productive workforce, higher healthcare costs, mental health issues, and more crime. Instead of cutting fixed spending, it would often be less harmful to cut discretionary spending – the programs the current government uses to achieve its policy goals. But of course no government wants to do that. People get into politics to change something, not to manage the existing system.