[anon1385]

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Austerity is a macroeconomic policy, and its presence or not is identified in macroeconomic indicators (e.g. government spending as a percentage of GDP). I would have thought that was obvious. The relevance of austerity to the article and other discussions of this type is that austerity is used as the justification for cuts to social services and the welfare state (even in cases when the amount of money being spent/cut is tiny so the difference it makes to the budget is negligible) and that these cuts cost lives (for no gain, since austerity doesn't work).

You can argue about whether there was ever any intention to actually reduce the deficit at all, since the results of austerity are well known to macroeconomists, but that just leads to the conclusion that the government is killing people (and tanking the economy) for purely ideological reasons (i.e. reducing the size of the state, at any cost). Which is hardly any better than the up front reason of "tough decisions" where some people supposedly need to die to save the economy.