Well, i was curious about the exact meaning of austerity so i looked it up before i wrote the post. The three or four sites that i visited (amongst them Wikipe

Well, i was curious about the exact meaning of austerity so i looked it up before i wrote the post. The three or four sites that i visited (amongst them Wikipedia) agreed with the meaning i used. Structural deficit is a poorly-defined term, in the sense that there are many reasonable values for it. If you define austerity this way, then we can't even agree if we have austerity or not. It's also not what most creditors care about. What does it matter if you don't get your money back because of cyclical or structural deficits? Perhaps you misunderstood me, i didn't mean to imply that austerity is equivalent to a balanced budget. I used austerity in the sense of "increasing revenues and reducing spending" to balance a budget that is in the red.