Earlier this month former President Bill Clinton backed Krugman's argument that a laser-sharp focus on cutting the deficit can lead to high unemployment and other economic problems, saying "It's obvious that if you overdo austerity, you get Europe".
"There is also a low road to fiscal balance, where you have austerity and you get the budget balanced at the cost of whacking the real economy".
And if you embrace austerity and thereby reduce economic growth you actually end up potentially in a worse place than you started, with a higher ratio of public debt to GDP.
The question is whether you support austerity now or not — saying that you would oppose austerity if politicians simultaneously did something they aren't going to do is, de facto, support for austerity.
That is likely to change with the same holding true in Britain as it does elsewhere: whether you vote for the Conservatives or Labour you get austerity.
The problem for the pundits is that if you begin with the assumption we are in a "time a scarcity" you get austerity and stagnation.
Elsewhere, you get austerity programs, which offer another set of natural experiments.
Instead, all they show is that if you have austerity policies at the same time that other big expansionary things are happening, the economy may actually expand.
"It's self-defeating, because if you have austerity and deflation in Greece, Portugal and Spain, then the European economy will not recover; firms will fail and jeopardize the banks".
It found that when you measured austerity right, it was contractionary, not expansionary; it did, however, find that spending cuts were less contractionary.
