Instead, brief bright spots of recovery have been overshadowed by rising unemployment and anemic economies, especially as debt-reduction austerity programs in Europe and spending cuts in the United States weigh on growth.
Obviously this is impressionistic, but there's a kind of delayed parallel: cuts, reductions, austerity, well, we lived through all this in Argentina in the 1990s.
In place of shared abundance, battles at every level of government now focus on picking the losers who will bear the costs of deficit reduction and austerity.
In last year's budget, which had debt reduction and austerity as its focus, Hockey estimated the average level of government spending over the four years to 2017-18 to be 24.9% of GDP.
He has invented a class of straw men who believe that fiscal expansion alone can solve all of Europe's problems, then uses the assertion that this is untrue — an assertion nobody disputes — to claim, or maybe just insinuate, that a reduction in austerity would achieve nothing at all.
In fact, with the referendum result backing him, Tsipras might feel emboldened to press for an even greater reduction of austerity measures, whereas some creditor countries might feel inclined to dig in their heels.
On the contrary, not only is the economy still a wreck for millions of Spain's residents, the recovery that has occurred owes much to the reduction of austerity and the implementation of a small stimulus that needs to be expanded in order to move toward full employment.
"We strongly support increased funding for NIH, and appreciate your identification of medical research as a priority in a time of deficit reduction and fiscal austerity," a coalition of universities and biotech companies called United for Medical Research (UMR) wrote to the bill's sponsor, Representative Gregg Harper (R-MS) on 27 June.
As a relative progressive, better on jobs versus deficit-reduction than the austerity crowd.
What he registers so forcibly is the fact that a hidebound, conservative approach to deficit reduction creates a social austerity far more harmful than the deficit itself.
The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass) has recently advised that already having had a £2.68bn reduction in funding since austerity measures were introduced it now anticipates a further cut of £800m over the next 12 months.
