>In the US, "austerity" was done by the Congress and forced on President Truman from 1946 - 1948. It worked quite well after the war The only reason it "worked

>In the US, "austerity" was done by the Congress and forced on President Truman from 1946 - 1948. It worked quite well after the war The only reason it "worked" was because it was implemented after the New Deal, which had provisions (like social security) that acted as a counter-cyclical automatic stabilizer. >The modern US has not bothered to reduce its borrowing or spending in a meaningful way. Naturally. The US economy would crater if it did. There has been a lot of political pressure to chip away at US social security, however, with austerity used as the pretext for why it is "necessary". Fortunately the AARP is a powerful enough political force in Washington to make this politically impossible. For now. As in Greece - all arguments about austerity go out of the window when talking about the military's budget, so this is most often used by Congress as a means of giving their constituents' economies a keynesian kick while not offending their corporate backers.