Nighttime Must-Read: Kevin Drum: Non-Chart of the Day: Where’s the Austerity?

‘Either austerity means nominal cuts and we never had any of it, or austerity means cuts relative to trend and we are still savagely in its grasp.’ Oh come on…. Let’s take a look at this chart done right… real per capita government expenditures…. This is what austerity looks like: a drop in government expenditures. For a little while, in 2009 and 2010, stimulus spending partially offset… but by the third quarter of 2010 the stimulus had run its course…. If you run this chart back for 50 years you’ll never see anything like it…. Finally, in 2014, the spending decline stops. Austerity is over, and we even start to see a small uptick. At the same time, the economy starts to pick up. This is not bulletproof evidence that austerity is bad for the economy, or that government spending helps it. But it’s certainly consistent with the hypothesis, and it’s really not hard to see.