Austerity doesn't mean high taxes. Austerity means cutting social programs and public investment.
Austerity can involve tax increases, spending cuts, or combinations of the two. It’s not limited simply to spending cuts.
That said, it very much matters what “kind” of austerity one engages in, as research indicates that tax increases and spending cuts have different respective effects on an economy.
In reality Austerity is defined by tax breaks for the very rich, combined with spending cuts and privatisation - i.e. economic enclosure, debt peonage, and asset sweating - for everyone else. Sometimes that includes tax increases, but if som it usually means indirect taxation.
Austerity is purely ideological. Even the IMF acknowledges that recent Austerity regimes have underperformed expectations while examples of stimulus spending have had the opposite effect.
This is objectively false, and a poor atempt at forcing a particular spin on a very objective definition.
Looking at Portugal, the bailout program enforced tax increases exclusively on the middle and upper class, along with publix sector workers who are by far more priviledged than private sector workers. For example, the bailout program saw the introduction of a new tax bracket for the richest taxpayers which forced a 53% income tax rate.
And also privatizations are implemented to avoid additional austerity pushes by providing the government with one-off sources of free cash thus avoiding further spending cuts or tax increases. Therefore, they are in fact an alternative to austerity, not a consequence.
> Austerity is purely ideological.
This statement is so mind-numbingly wrong that it boggles the mind how anyone in this point in time could be so disingenuous or clueless to keep parroting this silliness.
Let's look at Portugal, who doubled its sovereign debt fron 60% of the nation's GDP to over 120% in about 5 years prior to any mention of austerity, and did so by piling a string of yearly deficits of over 10% including a structural deficit of around 3%.
If your state is so dependent on overspending that it needs loans after loans to keep working and pay up salaries, who in their right mind will argue that they don't desperately need to cut spending and/or raise taxes to avoid going bankrupt or even to keep functioning?
If austerity was actually "purely ideological", how exactly would it be possible for Portugal to keep their 10% spending deficits?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity
Those who favor austerity will say that the austerity laid groundwork for Portugal's success, those who have opposing view say that it only helped.
As far as I'm concerned if a government spent and loaned recklessly for decades and the only solution is to make temporary cuts so the government can go right back to spending (ie, no long term changes to government culture, risk management, and fiscal responsibility were made) then while it's still "austerity", it's not necessarily a very useful one.
Additionally, despite all of the FUD about "austerity" measures the average nation state across the entire western world (and in Asia too, minus Singapore) have exploded in size over the last few decades.
Most of these "austerity" programs are a tiny, temporary, sliver relative to the massive growth in scale of the administrative state.
Nor can you point to some half-hearted "austerity" where there was no change in the gov culture which brought about the unsustainable spending, nor factoring in the complete scale on which the previous government spent recklessly for which austerity is required in some countries vs others (and size of GDP, dependency on public investment/social programs, etc).
Even HN isn't immune to political flamewars.
When has that ever happend?
People do not run successful campaigns on the basis of displacing hundreds of San Francisco families, for example, regardless of whether or not those families are rightfully entitled to their housing or not. Once people have come to rely on something, it will upend their livelihood to remove it, and that is not something most people are comfortable voting for.
If you've ever worked in a government job, you can compare the state of the bureaucracy now to previous versions of the texts, and see that they only ever grow and compound on themselves.