I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.
You're rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. You get into some pretty absurd taxation levels, you just won't get the sort of revenue that you need to balance a budget that is so much spending.
And the worst part is, the government's already taxing you for stuff that you should just get. The United States spends more public money on health care than most countries, as much money on health care as some single payer nations. Everyone seems to think that there needs to be more money, but there doesn't. The money is there. It's just not being used properly. In any other country on the planet that amount of money should result in universal healthcare. Instead, the government program is run so incompetently that every family needs to spend absurd amounts of money on Private health care.
This just seems to be the way that the US government works. They take the money to do a thing, then they just don't do the thing. That is an austerity, it's incompetence.
That's exactly the neoliberal agenda: austerity is spending less for workers and public services, and more to help companies so that growth can come back and make earth a paradise free of socialism.
Austerity has nothing to do with spending less. It's all about taking the money from the poor to give it to the rich.