<story><title>The plot against France</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/opinion/krugman-the-plot-against-france.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beedogs</author><text>If these tax-less spend-less austerity morons were right about their ideology, you&amp;#x27;d think it might have worked once in a while.  But it never has, nor will it ever.  Instead they&amp;#x27;ve taken to punishing the nations that prove them wrong.  Same thing is going on now in Australia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daniel-cussen</author><text>They did it in Chile after the coup (1973) and it worked...so...well.  Overnight, we went from masses of public servants endlessly on strike, 400% inflation, and halfway-to-Cuba socialism to tons of public servants getting fired (none of this furlough with back pay business) and the remainder shutting up and doing their work.  There was a small downtick in the economy, shortly, not unlike the downtick in US after WWI that ushered in the roaring twenties.  Naturally, the economy changed drastically because of the dictatorship and foreign loans make it slightly harder to analyze, and in 1982 the economy got hit badly for pegging the currency, which is a different story.  But they cut spending, lowered taxes, and it worked fantastically.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if, as a country, you&amp;#x27;re thinking of going down the tax-less spend-more road, you have to amass enough power in the hands of the people that will carry it out (in this case a dictator) that the public sector can&amp;#x27;t go on an endless tirade of strikes and sabotage.  If not, guess what&amp;#x27;ll happen?  The essentials from among the things the government provides will be the first to go in an attempt to rile the public up.  But how many cushy do-nothing bureaucrats will get fired?  That&amp;#x27;s where government spending is, in its vast majority—in the salaries of government employees.  If you want to tax less and spend more, keep in mind that you&amp;#x27;ll be going toe-to-toe with the people that run government (more-so than politicians) and that it&amp;#x27;s a serious political battle for the country to take on.&lt;p&gt;So in that sense you&amp;#x27;re right--expecting to politically shift over to tax-less spend-less policy may be fruitless and unrealistic, if only because the people one is trying to lay off will always sabotage the effort.</text></comment>
<story><title>The plot against France</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/opinion/krugman-the-plot-against-france.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beedogs</author><text>If these tax-less spend-less austerity morons were right about their ideology, you&amp;#x27;d think it might have worked once in a while.  But it never has, nor will it ever.  Instead they&amp;#x27;ve taken to punishing the nations that prove them wrong.  Same thing is going on now in Australia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noonespecial</author><text>I suspect austerity does work but has an inflection point. It can (theoretically) be used to cut outright government waste.&lt;p&gt;On a personal level, you might stop paying for your cable TV when money gets tight and have it make you better off. Not paying for your car and finding yourself unable to get to work would make you worse off despite the &amp;quot;savings&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The trouble with politics and austerity is they always seem to end up missing the car payments and keeping the cable on.</text></comment>