The Pro-Austerity Argument Evolves

A friend pointed me to this example by someone named Russ Roberts of the evolving argument of pro-austerity forces in the face of the obvious failure of their policies in Europe.

if you’re going to claim that the virtue of “slashing government spending” has been “overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the last two years” you ought to at least provide some evidence that there have been spending cuts in the last two years.

He goes on to point out that in fact spending has not really been "slashed" as Krugman and others keep saying it has.  Krugman himself has a short answer to this argument relating to the UK, and another relating to Ireland here.

So the argument of the Austerians now is that we never really tried Austerity, just like the Keynesians in the US complaining that we never really tried stimulus. The political world is full of half-measures of course. One point that is lost here is that austerity in Europe has meant higher taxes as well as cuts in spending, whereas in the US the anti-tax jihad of the GOP makes that impossible. In that sense it's apples and oranges a bit.

...which is why the only way to look at it fairly is to talk about relative austerity and relative stimulus, i.e. those policies in relation to other places, comparing results. Since virtually everyone is doing badly, all we can do is look at who is doing worse and try to discern why. The US didn't really do stimulus, since federal spending was largely offset by state/local cuts, but there was still relatively more stimulus than was seen in Europe at the time. And I'm willing to accept that austerity hasn't been fully and enthusiastically followed to the nth degree in Europe, and yet Europe has been relatively more austere than the US. And within Europe, some places were really austere, and some places weren't. My understanding is that the places that really cut hard did worse than those that cut less. The poster children for austerity- Spain, Ireland, Latvia- have had disastrous results.

What will it take for the Austerians to admit that their policies aren't working?